Transported to a Distant Realm by an Ancient Game of Battle

John Iwanaga unfolds his wooden game board and sets the bowl of black stones on the table in front of me. He takes the white stones.

We had chosen a side booth near the corner of the Sizzler on Western Avenue. Around us the tables are filled, the buffet line crowded, a din of conversation.

The bustle recedes as John and I enter the grid of a 4,000-year-old game, where we battle for life and death with black and white stones. My 14-year-old son seems to find unlimited appeal in computer shoot-’em-up games. But John and I go to a virtual place that connects with the human mind far more deeply than computer simulation.

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The rules of go are simple. Black and white stones are placed one at a time, black always first, on one of the 361 intersections, each piece making a satisfying thwack as it is slapped onto the fat wood board.

Once placed, the stones don’t move, unless they are surrounded and captured. The board starts out empty, and the players, drawing on as many stones as they need, fill in about two-thirds of the 19-by-19-line crosshatching as individual stones form groups and bump up against each other.

The object of the game is to surround more territory than your opponent.

Out of that simplicity blossoms what may be the most profound game of strategy ever devised. Unlike chess, the game remains essentially impenetrable to computers.

For centuries Japanese military leaders and, more recently, business titans have regarded mastery of go as an essential skill for those who have to make real-world decisions amid chaos and uncertainty.

The game unfolds as if a work of art in black and white. In Japan, the best boards, made from kaya wood, and stones of clamshell and slate cost thousands of dollars.

Chess is a Western game of strategy that typically reaches a single crescendo of focused battle, ending with the death of the king. Go is the quintessential game of the East, with perhaps half a dozen skirmishes raging simultaneously in a negotiation for coexistence. At the end both players are alive; the winner might control only a single intersection more than the loser.

Moves Can Reveal a Player’s Character

The battle starts sharply, as many of our games do. John, a 34-year-old graduate student at UCLA, always takes the biggest position he possibly can, his stones making great leaps across the board.

Go players say you see into your character by the way you play. If so, John, who grew up in Orange, is an optimist full of hope and energy about the world.

While he makes bountiful grabs for huge chunks of territory with big and fast moves, my character emerges in slow, small moves. It may be that I relocated a few too many times when I was growing up. But I want to calculate everything, which is impossible, and when I can’t I want comfort and certainty. I want to know that I can live. I know I should trust my intuition, but I often don’t.

John has beaten me many times by getting huge areas while I get lots of bits that in the end don’t amount to much. But I have been winning some games lately by forcing myself to make more big moves, trying to understand what he wants to do and then throwing a few stones into the heart of his area, pressing him low against the edge of the board and then running for my life.

I learned how to play go in 1969 when I was a teenager in Southern California spending weekends at chess tournaments.

I stopped playing because there was nobody to play with. Go is enormously popular in Japan, Korea and China--where the game originated 4,000 years ago--but not in San Bernardino. There were few books in English on the game.

But over the last 30 years the world has changed. I can sign on to the Internet and find strong opponents any time. Los Angeles has emerged as a center of go playing in the United States because of its fast-growing Asian populations, though the U.S. in general remains a go backwater. A Chinese go club meets in the San Gabriel Valley; there are two Japanese clubs and at least three Korean. A Hong Kong-born engineer runs a Santa Monica firm that publishes more than 60 titles in English on go.

The rising popularity of the game has even been picked up by Hollywood. Go played a role in the recent independent film “Pi.” National television audiences saw the game segueing into a sexual encounter on the hit Fox show “Ally McBeal.”

We had begun the game by occupying in turn the four corners. There is safety in the corners, first, and next on the sides. The center is most perilous.

Then in quick succession I approach both his corners, in effect asking: What do you want? Do you have ambitions toward the side, and if so, which side?

The result of my approaches is that my stones are arrayed solidly on the bottom of the board between his two corners, but I have allowed him positions on both the right and left. He builds on the left side first, creating a framework that could encompass a third or more of the board. I also defend the top left corner, a small, stuffy place that he allows me to extend along the top.

I take a deep breath and, stone by stone, plunge deeply into the middle of the left side, threatening to split him apart. As always, John responds sharply. He bellies up against me from both sides. My stones in this area become what is known as a dragon, an elongated group of connected stones that is vulnerable to attack. For it to live, I must enlarge the dragon with more stones, or connect it with another group on the board.

The game may be decided here. If my dragon can live, I will have destroyed John’s greatest potential, and my smaller but safer enclosures will put me ahead.

L.A. Club Is Among Nation’s Most Active

The L.A. Go Club, which has been operating in Koreatown since 1972, is among the strongest and most active in the United States. In the largest playing room, about 50 Korean men smoke cigarettes and gamble small sums of money as they slap glass stones onto wooden boards. From the entryway downstairs, between a Korean bakery and Japanese restaurant, the parlor sounds like a room full of dryers tumbling thick-buttoned shirts.

Gary Choi, 52, has owned the club for seven years but has managed it since 1984. He charges visitors $5 a day to play. The club, in a rundown mini-mall on Western Avenue, operates from 11 a.m. until late into the night; Choi recalls only one day when it was closed, during the 1992 riots.

Every Sunday he hires Yilun Yang, once the youngest professional player in China at the age of 14 and now a well-known teacher and author. Yang, 48, came to the U.S. in 1986, initially for a short-term visit to give go lessons to children of Chinese families in the Monterey Park area. He now lives in West Covina, travels widely and gives lessons 60 to 70 hours a week, often over the Internet.

“Ten years ago nobody here knew what go was,” he said. Now everyone he meets seems to know and is curious.

Yang’s Sunday lessons, held in a small playing room, are one of Los Angeles’ hidden treasures, as far as I’m concerned. But they can be humbling.

Yang is ranked as a seven-dan professional. The highest level is nine dan. (For amateurs, rankings start at 30 kyu and drop to one as players get stronger. The next step is then one dan, at which point the numbers rise to reflect strength.)

One recent Sunday, Yang studied the black stone I had placed on the grid in front of him for a split second. “Doesn’t hurt,” he declared.

Yang waited a beat as the half-dozen adult students gathered around him nodded sagely. Then he added, laughing, “Doesn’t help, either.”

“This is better,” Yang said, slapping the black stone onto the very next intersection, following quickly with a white stone and several more in alternation. “Here it’s a pincer move, it makes a threat and it’s good shape. Here it’s nothing.”

A 10-year-old boy who attends the lessons saw instantly what took me minutes to digest. There are some regulars, but the group varies from week to week, both in number and strength. Those who have attended several lessons typically address Yang respectfully as “master” or “sensei.”

“Is anything urgent?” Yang asked, cajoling his students with axioms about where to focus their thinking. “If not, where is the biggest area?”

Yang wore a polo shirt, khaki slacks and a blue watch and had a merry way about him, even while chiding. When one of his students said “I didn’t think of that” in response to a suggestion, Yang came back: “Ray, most good moves are because you didn’t think of it. This area has a 1% chance of having trouble; this area has a 90% chance to have trouble. Which needs help?”

“Sir, would you like some coffee?”

John and I hear the waitress at the same time, though she may have repeated herself three or four times already. We both shake our heads vaguely, eager to return to a much more compelling place, an ordered world with both delightful and terrifying consequences.

There we both are in jeopardy, everything at stake, yet both confident we can somehow prevail.

The waitress asks what game it is we are playing.

“Go,” we say, almost at the same time and then return--not realizing that we may have been rude--to that place where we are hunting and being hunted--in vast airy expanses here, in humid, suffocating jungle there.

A Severe Challenge to Programmers

For many years, the community of experts in artificial intelligence regarded chess as a good test for whether a computer could be programmed to think, at least in a narrow sense, as humans do. In the end, the computer solution to chess has taught us less about artificial intelligence than it has about creating a powerful, fast computer that can deal simultaneously with a series of related problems.

Computers, it turns out, can play a reasonable facsimile of strong chess by brute force--in the case of Deep Blue, the IBM creation that beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a match two years ago, examining on the order of 200 million positions a second.

Human chess players don’t think even remotely that fast. Instead the human mind employs a startling capacity to recognize patterns, examining only a few positions, but well-chosen ones.

Go provides a much more severe challenge to programmers. I am ranked as a national chess master and have 30 years of competitive tournament play behind me, yet almost any inexpensive chess program running on a desktop PC can beat me in a speed game. After studying go for only a year, I’m stronger than the best programs.

The most obvious reason is that there are more possible moves in go than in chess, where a typical position might allow a choice of 20 moves. Go offers hundreds of choices for each move, and the game might last twice as many moves.

David Mechner, 28, a doctoral student in neuroscience at New York University who is building a go-playing program as a hobby, calculated that it would take Deep Blue 70 years to calculate as deeply in a game of go as it does in three minutes of chess.

The failure of brute-force computing compounds an even more daunting problem for go programmers. In chess, the answer to a few simple questions about a particular situation gives a pretty good sense of which side is doing better: Who has more material? Are the kings safe? Which side has more control over the center of the board? Which side can make more moves?

In go, the evaluation of each position is far more complex. The obvious question, which side has more territory at a given moment, can be a tricky one even for top human players.

“Conceptually you count who’s ahead,” said Mechner, a top-ranked amateur player. “The problem is: You have to know what’s alive and what’s dead. That’s not at all clear most of the time.”

During most games, many groups may be endangered and only the course of battle reveals which will live or die.

David Fotland, a Hewlett-Packard software architect and author of a best-selling go-playing program, said: “Go is more likely to teach us something about artificial intelligence. If there’s ever going to be a computer to challenge top players, it probably will have to be based on a learning program.”

The problem is so far from being solved that major companies such as IBM haven’t even bothered trying--the public relations bonanza is too remote. A $1.6-million prize offered by the Ing Foundation in Taiwan for a program than can beat a professional go player will go unclaimed when it expires next year.

“Nobody can see [a computer champion],” Yang said. “Maybe in 50 years. It’s too difficult; just count the number of possible moves.”

John leaves my dragon for a moment to launch an attack on the top right corner, where I have a single stone. Maybe here his optimism has become a flaw. He wants to obliterate my corner position. He wants to kill me. If he succeeds, he not only will have destroyed an area I had counted on controlling, he also will have built influence and likely territory on the right side. And, most dangerous of all, he will have cut off the best escape route for my dragon. I feel a familiar tightening. Is it fear? Am I up to the onslaught? Which stones are most important? Along with the fear I feel exhilaration. I can do this. I can meet this challenge. He’s overreaching. The truth of the moment is that the black position should be able to hold up. But what is the way?

An American Is One of the World’s Best

In the West Los Angeles home of a retired aerospace engineer, a dozen go players gathered for a chance to play America’s most celebrated player. Michael Redmond, 36, grew up in Santa Barbara and traveled to Japan as a 13-year-old to study the game in the traditional way with a go master. He now lives in Japan and has become one of the strongest players in the world.

Redmond, an eight-dan professional, supports himself through teaching and exhibitions, and by competing in a complex circuit of go tournaments, the most prestigious titles based in Japan and dating back centuries.

The gathering of go players here is more about goodwill than serious competition, something akin to Bobby Fischer sitting down with a group of club players. In this setting, however, go has an advantage over chess.

Although few amateur chess players would have a prayer against a top grandmaster in any contest, go has a handicapping system that makes it possible for weaker players to compete more evenly with stronger players.

The system allows the weaker player to begin the game with nine or more stones placed at key intersections. This is a huge edge, and I played Redmond with a full nine-stone advantage.

Redmond, a compact man, played four games simultaneously arrayed on four boards on low tables around him. He clicked quickly from game to game with a gentle intensity.

I moved slowly, methodically trying to help particular stones and to make key chunks of territory impregnable. He played seemingly haphazardly, his stones sprinkled around the board without apparent pattern or purpose. It was as if we were each prospecting the same expanse of desert. While I saw nothing but the bland, shifting dunes on the surface, his vision penetrated far beneath to the mineral core.

My moves seemed defensive, but I hardly had a choice. His stones were scattered in such a way that I had no targets, even as he seemed to have no territory.

When he feinted toward one of my groups on the side of the board, I defended, and at that moment all his stones appeared to be precisely in the right place--like one of those jumbled computer-generated prints that suddenly reveals a gloriously complex three-dimensional picture as your focus shifts. One of my corners died, and with that nearly a quarter of the board became his territory. The rest was whistling.

After the game Redmond offered a few pointers. His concentration, understanding of the game and memory came together in a kind of parlor trick that was awesome to amateurs. In game after game he instantly reconstructed key positions, throwing the stones magically into place.

He noted the intersections that I should have occupied to make my corner invulnerable, emphasizing the go proverb that the enemy’s vital point is your own.

I counter John’s attack by thrusting into the right side. Even if I have to give up the corner itself, I reason, I’ll have made a reasonable trade if I can give my dragon a haven.

We each take longer on our moves now, but neither of us senses any lengthening of time. We are calculating as deeply as our knowledge and natural ability allow. We are caught up in a wonderful mental dance, a slow-motion sword fight. Our actions are illuminated by threat and counter, action and deception.

At these moments we have, for all practical purposes, gone to a distant place, far from the stresses and pettiness of everyday life. It is a good place to visit, and sometimes I don’t want to leave.

John describes these periods over the board as both “effortless and more intense than any other activity. I have no sense of time. Whatever problems I may have disappear. My mood is reduced to the condition of the stones on the board. I can think of nothing else.”

It dawns on both of us, at nearly the same moment, that John has miscalculated a key sequence. My stones near the corner at the top will connect with those on the right. He’ll lose a key group of three stones that had threatened to keep me separated.

He may live in the corner, but it will be small and painful and tight. My stones will face the world all around, shining brightly into all the shadowy places he’d wanted for himself. A relief and warm satisfaction course over me, inversely proportional to the pain and exposure he feels.

Anybody who becomes immersed in a game like chess or go eventually grapples with why it is so compelling that it occupies your mind like a piece of music or a love affair.

These games create an ordered world with both wonderful and awful consequences based on clear rules. That imaginary world can have an addictive quality.

John Iwanaga believes that’s worth studying. “If you could harness those [addictive] qualities and apply them to education,” he says, you’d have a valuable tool that could be used to motivate students, explaining the idea behind his PhD thesis.

Penetrating All the Reaches of the Mind

Go is the kind of game that seems to penetrate to all reaches of your mind. Nobel Prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata described one, months-long match in his book, “The Master of Go”:

“It seemed to me that the unmoving stones, as I gazed at them from the side of the board, spoke to me as living creatures. The sound of the stones on the board seemed to echo vastly through another world.”

For me the ideas that emerge in games float through my thoughts like refrains of elegant melodies.

Watching my son’s Little League game, I had a sudden moment of recognition as he came to bat with runners on base. The movement of the runner on second was like a feint toward a corner position.

At my older son’s high school soccer match I experienced a flash of familiarity as the players grouped and regrouped to control territory.

Some experts have suggested that there is a connection between certain games and the hard wiring of brains, much as language is both learned and wired into us.

One of the most persuasive descriptions of why games connect so deeply with us is outlined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a University of Chicago psychologist who has written for many years about research into what makes people happy.

In his book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,” he suggests that people achieve happiness by learning to control inner experience and that certain activities, including work, art and sport, help us do that.

“The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile,” he writes.

Some games create ideal conditions for negotiating between anxiety and boredom. Those conditions include the continual learning of new skills in an ordered arena and a real sense of jeopardy that falls short of overwhelming. When these elements combine, we achieve our highest levels of concentration; the rest of the world recedes and we are happy.

Many go players contend that playing makes you smarter, that every child would benefit from learning the game and that every adult can gain insight into himself by examining his style of play.

“Personality traits come out in go,” said Fotland, the San Jose software engineer. “The game teaches you that greed and overreaching don’t work.”

Yang shrugs off the question of why people play go. “It’s human,” he said. “Being human, it’s not just eating and sleeping. That’s not enough.”

Csikszentmihalyi’s analysis satisfies me; go makes me happy.

John sees one more chance. If he can press down on my group on the bottom, perhaps he can still isolate my dragon. But this is a high-risk strategy because my stones now radiate power at the top and right side of the board. He’ll have to play very tightly and accurately.

John has more experience than I do, and he scares me, even from a position of weakness. He presses and I defend.

The dragon is cut from the bottom position. For a moment it appears that he has separated it from the top and side also, but the fight enters a new phase of fearsome confusion in which we each have groups of stones cut off in the middle of the board. Who is hunting? Who is hunted?

Again, I am sure that the truth of the position lies with me. He has to take the risks; I merely have to survive now. When I cut through to safety, John concedes the game.

There is no point counting territory. I have 30 points at the bottom, nearly that much at the top and another 20 or so in the center and on the right side. His right side has been reduced to 20, his left side to 20 or so and the top right corner to perhaps five.

We talk about the game and look over a few key points, now operating more out of curiosity than conquest. I know that John is as likely to beat me next time. I have to keep trying to understand the game. I have to keep working on my ability to calculate. I have to trust my intuition at key points.

We notice that the Sizzler has virtually cleared out. We’ve been there three hours.

I’m triumphant and relaxed. But at such moments, I confess to a pang of loss. I’d rather be back in the world of a 4,000-year-old board game than watching busboys mop fried foods from a Sizzler floor.

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The Game of Go

* Traditionally played on carved, wooden board with black and white stones of slate and clamshell.

* In ancient China, where it originated 4,000 years ago, go was one of the Four Arts, along with music, painting and poetry.

* Buddhist priests introduced the game to Japan about 1,200 years ago. By the 18th century, it attained a status equal to that of the famed tea ceremony.

* More than 25 milllion people play go worldwide. Most are in China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. There are about 20,000 players in the United States.