Go and Life
While playing the game of Go, one can draw analogies between the players, the pieces, the board, and the decisions that are made. I will be using such analogies to draw similarities between Confucius ideas and the game of Go. For example, the players of Black and White can be considered as opposition, forces that move against each other. Another example are the pieces on the board, each stone can relate to a single person or decision. Standing alone, a stone can be weak or strong just like how people and decisions can be weak or strong. Figures such as George Washington, Martin Luther King, and many others are the embodiment of strong singular figures. A group of stones can also be strong or weak. Groups such as the Democratic Party or Republican Party are strong groups in the political world when the average book club has very little weight on political matters. The strength and weakness of individuals or groups are based on situation such as how, on the Go board, stones are weak or strong depending on position.
Determinism and The Ladder Problem of Life
Go is simplistic because each move requires only one stone. However, as more and more stones are placed on the board, more strategy and forward-thinking is necessary to beat your opponent. However, unlike other games, it is hard to gauge who is winning and losing by reading a mid-game board. Because of the many combinations possible, a win is reliant on how good a person plays and how few mistakes he makes. This is similar to the Confucian thought of Determinism. When one makes a mistake in life he has to live that mistake out. For example, if one month a person overspends and is unable to pay his bills, he incurs fees from the utility company. As a result, he must pay those fees. If he continues to overspend, he will continue to incur more fees and he may find himself homeless because he can’t pay for anything. This real-life problem is similar to the ladder problem from Go. Falling into a ladder problem, a player can decide to cut their losses and lose one or two pieces. However, if the player decides to go into a ladder problem blindly, he may find himself playing deeper and deeper into a hole. When he finally hits a wall, all of his pieces are dead.
Life and Death
Confucius believed in the idea of Existential Moments. He believed that during these moments, the choice that an individual chose would affect him for the rest of his life. These decisions could be as simple as deciding whether to sell one’s cow or not and as severe as deciding not to take a job. These actions would influence the actions of others, despite, at the moment, if that path was clear or not. These life or death moments also occur in Go when a huge stake is at play. While the goal of Go is to gain more territory than your opponent, sacrificing too many prisoners is destructive to the end game since each prisoner will take away one territory point.
On the Go board, these existential moments often manifest when one player has to make eyes. The player is surrounded by his opponent and must make “eyes” in order to live. However, there are situations where there are dead eyes or when your opponent is able to outplay you. In these moments, it is not the maneuvering of making eyes that is important, but also of the many decisions you made to reach that point. Thus, an existential moment may occur during the making of eyes but most often, it is the few moves before that moment that predicts the outcome of the match.
The player can sometimes be given opportunities to maneuver this though. In a closed systems one can lose their pieces but on an open board, a player can force their opponent to play on a different part of their board effectively giving the player two or more moves to “live.”