Edward Lasker's Famous Go Quote

[nagano]

While the Baroque rules of Chess could only have been created by humans, the rules of Go are so elegant, organic, and rigorously logical that if intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in the universe they almost certainly play Go. - Edward Lasker

What do you think was meant by this statement? Do you agree with it?

[entropi]

What I understand is the following:

The rules of logic is universal. Consider the basic principle that "a" is equal to "b" implies that "b" is equal to "a". This principle is (let's say most likely) not created by human, but it's a universally correct rule. If intelligent life forms exist elsewhere, they should also follow this rule for modelling their environment.

On the other hand, there are also rules that are not universal but specifically adapted to human needs. For example the rules of elegance, social rules, etc. They are certainly not universal and it would be weird to expect that other intelligent life forms apply these exact rules.

These examples are two extremes. What I understand from Lasker's statement is that chess is closer to the latter extreme, while go is closer to the former.

While admitting there is a lot of exaggaration in that statement, I tend to principally agree with it.

[Li Kao]

I'm not sure if aliens would play go, since their minds might be far too different from ours. But if we talk about the probability of a human inventing it independently it's surely higher than for most other games. If we look at the essential rules of go they are very simple.

1) Two players alternate putting a black/white stone on a free field on a rectangular board. This rule is very simple and exists in many games. I'm sure several of those games were invented completely independent.
2) The capture rule. That's what really defines go. It's simple enough to be plausibly reinvented.
3) In a game where you capture your opponent's stones counting the stones of each play on the board is a natural scoring function. It is also used in many other games. You might end up with a slightly different scoring function from what we use, such as stone-scoring. But that's still go.
4) Some kind of ko rule shouldn't be hard to discover. If you play the game with only rules 1-3 you'll get into a situation where the players undo each other's move and the game freezes. Forbidding this cycle is natural. But of course if the inventor doesn't get that idea he might discard the game.

My conclusion is that since most rules are common in other games and the only rule that really distinguishes go is relatively simple and elegant the chances of re-inventing go are rather large. The main problems I see aren't the invention process itself, but
1) The inventor discarding the game as boarding before discovering the depth of the game. Go at 30k level isn't that much better than other games. And since you just invented the game you can't know how much strategic depth it offers at higher levels.
2) The inventor not being able to popularize the game against the competition. A good inventor isn't necessarily a good marketeer, and go isn't the easiest game to market.

[robinz]

I think Li Kao's final paragraph is absolutely spot on. Assuming that there are alien civilisations, and that the concept of playing a board game for enjoyment would make sense to them (which are both fairly large assumptions, of course), it is highly likely that someone from such a civilisation would invent a game recognisable as Go (even if different in a few of the details of the rules - note that I would consider variants on non-square lattice, or 3D versions, and so on, as still "essentially Go" in this context) - this is what I understand by Lasker's quote, and I agree with it. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the game would be widely played, or have any prestige, in that particular alien culture.

[topazg]

It could be nothing more than his use of artistic license to pay homage to a game he thought was elegant and deep

[John Fairbairn]

This Lasker was part of the same group and background as players such as world chess champion Emmanuel Lasker. Their belief in logic was so profound that it give rise to a story given by Edward in Go Review.

News came that a Japanese 1-dan amateur would be passing through Berlin and would play them on 9 stones. Emmanuel said, "There isn't a man in the world who can give me 9 stones. I have studied the game for a year and I know I understood what they were doing." But, despite playing in consultation and playing slowly, he was crushed and was heartbroken. Alien 1, "Intelligent" human 0.

There is a little more to go than supposedly elegant rules.

[Loons]

Just to entertain the idea, I would think the most likely difference would involve capture. Consider something like the simultaneous capture rule someone suggested, that seems a perfectly interesting (and in some ways or to some people, possibly even more natural).

[robinz]

I'm not sure I see your point, John? To me, all that story (someone else posted it recently to an entirely different part of this forum, although I don't remember who or which thread, or I'd try to find it) shows is that Go is in fact even deeper than Lasker thought (you can study and play the game for a year and still have no chance even with 9 stones against a player who himself would probably lose a 9-stone game against a top professional). I don't see how it takes away from the "naturalness" of the rules, which for me is the only real message of the quote. (Although it's also pretty miraculous that such "simple" and "natural" rules give rise to a game with such depth that there are so many widely different levels of skill - the latter being something demonstrated by this latest story.)

[topazg]

This Lasker was part of the same group and background as players such as world chess champion Emmanuel Lasker. Their belief in logic was so profound that it give rise to a story given by Edward in Go Review.

News came that a Japanese 1-dan amateur would be passing through Berlin and would play them on 9 stones. Emmanuel said, "There isn't a man in the world who can give me 9 stones. I have studied the game for a year and I know I understood what they were doing." But, despite playing in consultation and playing slowly, he was crushed and was heartbroken. Alien 1, "Intelligent" human 0.

There is a little more to go than supposedly elegant rules.

I heard that, apocryphally, the visiting Japanese players was considered a "Go master", and I had assumed was therefore professional - is there more information on this?

[hyperpape]

I said I disagree, but really I think it's harmless exaggeration, as most people use it.

Strictly speaking, I think rules cannot be called logical or illogical. They can be reasonable or unreasonable, good or bad, beautiful or ugly, but logic says nothing about the right rules, though logic can be a tool for investigating the best rules.

[John Fairbairn]

I heard that, apocryphally, the visiting Japanese players was considered a "Go master", and I had assumed was therefore professional - is there more information on this?

If it was a pro I think we can assume his name would have been mentioned somewhere. In those days, around 1910, amateur ranks did not exist and the convention was for strong amateurs to be given a 1-dan diploma on the pro scale (but never higher, except in a couple of cases where the player was really a semi-professional). Equally conventionally, we tend to call that 5-dan amateur today, but as such diplomas were purchased, it really covered quite a range.

Edward Lasker, some long time after (1950s), reached what Takagawa rated then as a modern 1-dan amateur (maybe 3-kyu now?), so we may assume he was much weaker in 1910. Emanuel seems to have been stronger then, but not by much. Three games by Edward survive for us to make our own assessment. Only one by Emanuel seems to exist, against Felix Dueball. Franco Pratesi (in his excellent EuroGo) suggests Emanuel was slightly weaker than Dueball, and I assume that this assessment was largely based on this game. But that was much later, in March 1930. Probably even Dueball was still quite weak then. A couple of months later he set off to study in Japan for over a year, and eventually became good enough to play top pros on five stones (and got an honorary 1-dan diploma for that). I don't know, but I'd guess he then left Emanuel some way behind.

It should be no surprise that there was such a gap between East and West then. It wasn't much different even in Wimmer's time, and he became pro. Though he was apparently styled as a 5-dan amateur in 1972 (at age 26; he was given 5-dan formally by the Nihon Ki-in in 1974), we have him taking five stones from Yasunaga and four from Ishida. Yet Wimmer had innumerable advantages compared to the early European players.

The same sort of large gap seems to have existed in the USA, too.

[entropi]

Three games by Edward survive for us to make our own assessment.

Where to find them? Would be interesting to see.

[jts]

I heard that, apocryphally, the visiting Japanese players was considered a "Go master", and I had assumed was therefore professional - is there more information on this?

I read a version of this where it was explained that the player in question was a math professor passing through Berlin on his way to a visiting post at Cambridge. Ah, here it is : link Not Cambridge, London. Presumably a math professor cannot also be a Go professional. But if we really cared about his exact identity, there can't have been *that* many Japanese mathematicians teaching in the UK circa 1907-1910. Sounds like something that would only require a medium level of research.

[HermanHiddema]

According to http://jerome.hubert1.perso.sfr.fr/Go/H ... Lasker.htm (quoting Lasker from Go review 1961, N° 9) the visiting Japanese Mathematician was shodan. I take it this means, as John notes above, that he was a strong amateur.

[fwiffo]

I think one assumption taken for granted is that intelligent life elsewhere would have an interest in games. It seems likely, given that most of the relatively intelligent animals on Earth seem to like games (parrots, dogs, dolphins...), but I don't know if we can take it as a given.

If aliens have an intelligence on par with humans, even if it's a very different way of thinking, they'd certainly understand go. The mathematical description can be made very simple and elegant. Whether they'd independently discover it, the way we'd assume they'd independently discover other math concepts like prime numbers is a harder question. Go, for instance, doesn't seem to have been independently discovered by other ancient humans (e.g. we don't find some go-like game being played by Aztecs or Celts or something).

If it was really that universal, I'd expect it to crop up more than once on Earth. Other cultural concepts (e.g. Pyramids, certain paleolithic technologies, some attributes of language, etc.) have shown up more than once. Likewise, evolution has reproduced certain universal features more than once (things like flight have evolved multiple times independently).