Imagine you are at a dinner party with friends. Plates of roasted meats and greens are being passed around and glasses clinked for cheers. It’s an evening of hearty chatter and shared laughter.

What kinds of topics would you bring up at the dining table? Perhaps you’d enchant everyone with tales of your latest travels or start a deep conversation on the poetry of the cosmos. If you are comfortable with storytelling, there could be an endless list of memories and ideas to choose from.

Unfortunately for my dinner audience, however, I would want to talk about something that is perhaps at the bottom of that endless list: telling friends about an ancient board game in the hopes that they’d pick it up and play it with me.

That ancient board game is called Go, as it is known in Japan and in the Western world, or weiqi (围棋) in China and baduk (바둑) in Korea. But rather than bore everyone with explaining the rules of the game¹, I’d instead tell you why I have enjoyed playing Go so much.

And so, this is really just a draft for me to practice for my future, not-hypothetical dinner party. Ahem, clink clink, please hear me out.

* * * * *

It Is Analytical: I started playing Go around the same time as when I started watching the Korean drama series, Reply 1988. In the show, one of the main characters is a teenager who grew up as a Go prodigy. Throughout the series, he wins multiple international Go tournaments but also suffers from headaches, on account of having to use his genius brain so much.

But as much as I tried at the time, no amount of headaches got me to become a better Go player.

Kidding aside, part of why I enjoy Go is because it involves applying analytical thinking and visualising spatial relationships. Similar to chess, each move comes with further possibilities as you try to calculate potential outcomes. Since Go is scored by a points system, you can also continually incorporate the different outcomes into estimating whether you or your opponent would be up in score in the next ten, twenty moves.

This is a mental exercise that can be both fun and challenging, and – I promise – mostly headache-less.

* * * * *

It Is Emotional: One of my first losses in Go was losing by half a point after I made a blunder in the endgame. In that moment, I felt much like this 19th century Japanese woodblock print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi. I was surprised I could feel so upset over such an abstract game.

Thinking back on it, I know now why playing Go can be such an emotional experience; it’s because you’re forced to confront yourself throughout the entire game. To put it in concrete terms, when you place your pieces (“stones”) on the board, you cannot move them and generally do not remove them either.² And so, as the stones fill the board over the course of a game, you begin to see your decisions take shape as realised successes from a larger strategy or – worse – as mistakes you hadn’t anticipated.

And unlike chess where you generally play to checkmate, Go relies on scoring to determine the winner of the game.³ This means you can play the entire game thinking you are ahead by, only to realise you had actually miscalculated the score. On the flip side, you might feel elated when you’ve discovered you were ahead the entire game.

These are, of course, extreme examples. What I really want to say is simply that Go gets you in touch with your emotions just as much as it does the logical/analytical sides. It can offer a lesson on hubris and self-doubt, and excitement and despair. Occasionally, you’ll also learn to suppress that urge to flip the board in frustration.

* * * * *

It Is Technology: It was a friend from university who got me to play Go. One day she told me she had watched the AlphaGo Documentary from DeepMind and suggested that I check it out.

At the time, I only vaguely knew about the board game and was more fascinated with the technologies discussed in the film. The lead engineers spoke of how creating software that can play profession-level Go represented a milestone for advancing artificial intelligence. To achieve this, they developed deep neural network systems enabling their program – named AlphaGo – to mimic the “intuition” a human player might display when playing Go.⁴

DeepMind’s focus on Go was part of a larger story about the evolution of machine learning techniques and its implications for society as a whole. For example, in recent years, the research lab’s success with its AlphaFold software made headlines for its ability to predict protein structures, which has helped aid researchers with further exploring rare diseases and accelerating drug discovery.⁵

Imagine that, an ancient board game helping to advance artificial intelligence! This was the idea that led me to try out Go.

* * * * *

It Is Human: Still, it was another story in the DeepMind documentary that captivated me the most. It’s the story of Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol playing against AlphaGo. The match was a best-of-five series, with DeepMind looking to test its creation against one of the best players in the history of Go.

There are plenty of write-ups on the match itself, such as this piece from Wired. Go professionals from around the world commented on AlphaGo’s seemingly invincible ability and remarked on the program’s ability to come up with moves that broke conventional wisdom in Go strategy.⁶ But just when utter defeat seemed inevitable, Lee Sedol mesmerized the Go community by playing a “God’s Move” that led to him winning Game 4 against AlphaGo.⁷ To date, that is the only game any human player has ever won against any version of AlphaGo.

In that single move, Lee Sedol showed that humans could go above simple, calculative analysis, move past the emotions of having lost three games in a row, face up against a seemingly unbeatable innovation, and muster the creativity to prevail. It was an inspiring moment for celebrating the imagination that humans possess to overcome adversity.

Imagine going home to say you were able to beat AlphaGo.

Now, wouldn’t that be an incredible story to tell at a dinner party?

Footnotes:

1. For those who do want a quick explanation of Go: It is a two-player game played on a gridded board (generally 19×19) with black and white “stones”. The players take turns to place their stones on the intersections of the grid, with the aim of the game to control more of the board (known as territory) than your opponent. This objective can be achieved through a combination of surrounding empty space and/or capturing your opponent’s stones. In fact, the Chinese name of 围棋 literally translates to “to encircle” (围) and “chess or chess-like game” (棋).
2. Stones do get removed from the board when they’ve been “captured”. See https://senseis.xmp.net/?RuleOfCapture for a visual description.
3. To elaborate: A Go game ends when both players “pass” on their turn, after which they will count their territory to see who has more points. Conversely, similar to chess, a player can also resign (which counts as a loss).
4. Go technically has more possible game combinations (at 2×10¹⁷⁰) than all the atoms in the observable universe (10⁸⁰), so it would be impossible for a computer program to run through all the possible scenarios to identify the most optimal move. As such, DeepMind engineers sought to mimic how a human might intuitively start from a much smaller set of “best moves” to choose from. See DeepMind’s research papers for maths applied in this approach: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/alphago/AlphaGoNaturePaper.pdf and https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.06855v1.pdf.
5. While AlphaFold does not use the exact same ML techniques as AlphaGo, it still represents DeepMind’s progression in using artificial intelligence to tackle ever-more-complex problems. See their blog on AlphaFold’s journey: https://www.deepmind.com/blog/alphafold-reveals-the-structure-of-the-protein-universe.
6. See AlphaGo’s “move 37” in Game 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo_versus_Lee_Sedol#Game_2.
7. See Lee Sedol’s “move 78” in Game 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo_versus_Lee_Sedol#Game_4.
8. About the artwork: The image at the top shows the first 21 moves of a friendly online tournament I played in (for fun) last year!
9. About the title: I apologise for the cheesiness of the title 🙂