The famous games between Shusai and Kitani were later fictionalized by Kawabata in his classic work *The Master of Go*. The style of the prose and the attention to necessary detail draw upon Kawabata's masterful ability as a journalist. He delicately reports on Shusai's corrupt and petty nature, his austere home life, while chronicling the tragic descent of a man unwilling to allow the next generation to take its rightful place. I speculate that the severity of his critique was part of the motivation for *fictionalizing* the story.
The article briefly touches on the combinatorial nature of the game but misses to emphasize one of my favorite differences relative to chess. In chess, the pieces are pre-defined, while in go one builds *shape* stone by stone. In chess, a bishop or a queen is exactly a bishop or a queen, while in go the *meaning* of a shape is subject to constant change. I very much like David's comparison of thickness to "establishment of robust phenotype", aji to latent variation (though this last metaphor misses the "fishy" or "dank" interpretation of the word aji.
When describing the goals of the game to beginners or the uninitiated, I tend to steer away from the *capture* aspect of the game. It always seems misleading. While capture is a mechanic in the game, many games are played without a single explicit capture and many can be played without any capture. The metaphor I prefer is one of two plants in the same pot. Sometimes one will grow such that another's roots will wither or die, but both plants will likely live, just one a little better than the other. The possibility of a *peaceful* game is one of the more interesting qualities of go.
One night, a few winter's ago, I ran into David at one of our Santa Fe go club meetings at the Violet Crown. He watched my buddy Max and I play a game, and the three of us chatted go. Shortly after, he acquired a go board for the institute. Unfortunately, there wasn't really anyone besides myself who really played. I did get to have a really good game in the library with NYU's Frank Lantz. I very much look forward to a post-pandemic world where I can have beers with friends while throwing stones on a board.
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