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Thickness is a difficult concept. I am going to give a very rough-hewn account here, and for reasons of space and laziness will not qualify some statements that may benefit from qualification, nor will I give any diagrams. I am not trying to paint the Sistine Chapel, but simply daubing graffiti on walls - walls that I intend to knock down.
Thickness is a Japanese concept. It evolved early in Edo times and was a Japanese attempt to define strategic values in go. In part they looked at China, where the dominant concept was shi 勢, which you will encounter often in Sun Zi’s two-millennia old Art of War. Shi was applied to go very early on in go but was not discussed as a specialised go concept, nor was it defined. In fact, a definition would be very difficult. This mysterious shi is still dominant in Chinese military and political strategy, and western analysts and defence experts spend megadollars trying to understand it. Not very well, it must be said, though an exception must be made for the recent work of Mott and Kim.
“Shock and awe” is still the favourite tool in the box for Clausewitzian western soldiers, according to Mott and Kim. Glibly, we might even say the Chinese strategy is “awe and shock”. By hinting at your awesome strength first, you often end up winning without having to fight (a major tenet of the Art of War). But if you do fight, with shi you fight where you are strong rather than where the enemy is weak, and so end up having to fight less than, say, the western forces that recently invaded Iraq. No political comment is to be inferred from this - the point being made is simply that a very different strategic tradition exists in China.
Japan turned 勢 into thickness probably for two reasons. One is that they abandoned the 勢子 or four starting stones of ancient Chinese go, and the consequent different use of the corners and sides required a different dynamic. Another likely reason was the very different nature of military tactics in almost entirely mountainous Japan. A possible third factor was the Chinese predilection for encroachment rather than invasion. If you invade, you are creating a separate group inside an enemy area. Under old Chinese rules, you are starting out with the disadvantage that you will have to pay a group tax of two points for your new group even if it lives. In practice you will probably have to pay more. The enemy will almost certainly be able to join up at least a couple of his own groups in the process of sealing in the invader, and so will save having to pay some tax of his own. Encroaching from a connected group makes economic sense in old Chinese go. Japan abandoned group tax very early on.
形 xing is another important concept in ancient Chinese military thinking. The Japanese retained that as good shape, and that's not so different from the Chinese military sense of 'optimum disposition of troops'. The third major word in military thinking 利 li or advantgage has been incorprated, in both China and Japan, in concepts such as sente and forcing moves. These last two terms don't need much commentary but 勢 is problematical.
It is problematical because it encompasses, in go terms, two things: power and influence. The Japanese felt the need to distinguish these two things, and so they started using separate terms for the two things. Sometimes they seem to overlap but that is a linguistic problem where the main victims have been western players.
Japanese has two words for thickness: atsumi and atsusa. The root word, atsui (thick) has at least four uses in go. Western players have suffered because translators have used thickness and thick without clarifying the differences. A further problem has been that western players, probably because of the chess tradition, have paid more attention to joseki than is perhaps wise, and since so many josekis end up with a division between what has been called thickness or influence and profit, players have ended up with Plato's prisoners' problem of confusing shadows with reality. Thickness and influence are not the same, and in this joseki context, thickness is rarely thickness.
Before going on to explain that, I must add that Japanese has separate words for influence. They use 勢力 for that, though power would probably be better, and the sort of outside shape you get in josekis is often called 外勢, where 'outside influence' is probably the best equivalent.
The Japanese equivalents of our word 'thickness' are atsumi and atsusa. The ending -mi adds an idea of -ishness, or vagueness. Atsumi is therefore NOT thickness but wannabe thickness. Atsumi is what you get on the outside in josekis. It is not the finished article. Although, technically, the root adjective is atsui, it would be extremely unusual to use atsui of the pie crust on a joseki. Josekis are baked with filo pastry - you need hamete to get shortcrust pastry.
Since thickness means solidity, brief thought will explain why atsumi normally only occurs on the outside - on the inside, the edges of the board provide extra protection.
Real thickness is atsusa. The -sa implies something substantive. This refers to a solid position that cannot be sensibly attacked. It can occur anywhere on the board, but since the edges again provide a lending hand, it is more likely to occur initially in the corners and on the sides. But it can develop on the outside later, and a prime goal in various go strategies is to turn atsumi into thickness. Since this would normally come out as turning thickness into thickness in English, you can see why some strategical idea don't carry over all that well from Japanese. If the adjective atsui is used of positions early in the game, you can usually take it for granted it refers to atsusa and not atsumi.
This Japanese word for thick (atsui) is, however, commonly used in two other derived ways in go. One is late in the game where a typical assessment of the position is that 'White is thick', to use the usual but poor translation. It actually means White is thickER, and the intended nuance is that as White has a more solid position than Black, he is likely to pick up points in the endgame and not give many away, and so he is likely to win a close game.
The other meaning is when atsui is used of a person's style. It is important to note that this means he will favour atsusa. He will not mess around with the puff pastry of atsumi on the outside. He will play honte (safe-and-sound moves) and stress eye-shape. He will tend to hope for a win in the endgame, although his rock-solid positions will give him the upper hand if early fighting occurs.
I sometimes refer to these four kinds of thickness as MI-thickness, SA-thickness, ER-thickness and STYLE-thickness.
So, are walls thick? Not necessarily. If they are attackable they are weak and so are not thick, even if they have influence. Thick walls need a base or eye shape. Even if they appear to have these but have weak points, they are not thick. And since 'thick' usually has the sub-text 'good', if a wall or other position is safe but overconcentrated, it tends not to be called thick.
Going back to 勢 for a moment, one reason it is not the same as Japanese thickness (and hence the reason that modern Chinese players have imported back the Japanese concept of thickness) is that it implies power, yes, but power based on position rather than power based on mere solidity. The four starting stones or shi stones of ancient Chinese go have that power based on their position on the 4-4 points. If they had been placed on the 3-3 points instead, they would hardly have been called shi stones. This aspect of a dominating position is absent from the usual Japanese idea of thickness (recall that atsumi is puff pastry and atsusa is easier to make on the edges initially), but the old Japanese were aware of the importance of position. They render that as 位 (kurai, or highness of position), a term more commonly used in shogi (e.g. if you have control of the centre rank), but in go it tends not to be used very much in texts for amateurs. It is, however, quite common in pro talk and is seen as important.
Do the Japanese get confused by the various usages of thick? Not really, though judging whether a position is thick (atsusa) can be an art rather than a science. E.g. it may have dangly bits - one player may see them as sacrificial bait and so not a weakness; another player may see it them as 'mine, all mine!' Sometimes the atsusa sense of atsui rather than atsumi will be brought out by an extra sentence using the word katai (solid).
But do we get confused? I'd say, "Yes, badly." It's hard to unwind several decades of dubious translations, but things would have probably been a lot clearer if 'solid' had been used for atsui in the atsusa sense. 'Thickness' then could then have been satisfactorily limited to the pie crust meaning.
Bon appétit!
This post by John Fairbairn was liked by 13 people: Aeneas, cdybeijing, daal, deja, Gresil, hoshizora, imabuddha, jts, Perception, Phoenix, quantumf, richardamullens, Stable |
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John Fairbairn
