Life In 19x19

The video Series 3, Episode 27 "Midnight Diner" on Netflix has a big sighting of Go. A woman character is apparently an insei and works as a timekeeper in rapid tournament games. We see pros playing and hear her counting the seconds. Another character is romantically attracted to her and to get her attention he tries to learn how to play go using an instruction book titled "How to Play Go for Middle aged Dummies".

In PriPara, the best human igo player in the world is a middle school girl who is so far ahead of any other player that due to lack of competion, she switches career and becomes joins the PriPara idoltraing and puts her igo skills to use by predicting others' behaviours . . .

Not sure how "mainstream" it is, but David Nolen gave a talk at Strange Loop, a tech conference, on Go that wasn't Golang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2yJ3FBtU4Y

both 囲碁 and 将棋 appear in Nichijou! So . . .

gowan wrote:The video Series 3, Episode 27 "Midnight Diner" on Netflix has a big sighting of Go ...he tries to learn how to play go using an instruction book titled "How to Play Go for Middle aged Dummies".

I'll try to find that episode today! Thanks. I enjoy Midnight Diner tremendously. Hmmm, Netflix USA lists only two seasons of Midnight diner with ten episodes each. Wait, this is "Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories." There is another earlier series with a similar title. Hard to find those earlier episodes on Netflix. Go appears ever-so-briefly but the highlight is this aphorism from the Master about go, marriage, and cooking: "If you don't clean the clams, the soup wil be sandy."

Blue Eye Samurai on Netflix, episode 7

Soseki Natsume, I am a Cat, Chaper XI.

It's hardly fresh news, but I just noticed that go makes an appearance in a little 1983 French movie called Le Faucon (the hawk).

Technically speaking, Le Faucon belongs to a specific movie category knwon in French as "nanar", a word without English equivalent, and translated as "[a] film that's so bad it's good". In that case, it is a very cheap thriller movie, with some hallucinatingly absurd ideas into it. For the ones curious about it, and lovers of the genre, I garantee it's worth your time.

Anyway, at one point, the hero, a formerly elite cop looking for revenge, go to visit his father (?) ; and the aformentioned father is playing a go game against himself.
As it is often the case when go makes an appearance into western movies, the material is mistreaten, as the hero spills the stones into the board...
... and arrange a little position to illustrate his (very complex) point of view : he places a black stone surrouded by many white ones, meaning the bad guy he is looking after is encircled by police forces and has no chances. I cannot attach more than 3 pictures, but it's not hard to imagine.

I did not look that closely, but the game set on the first picture looks surprisingly accurate!...

Go appears in The Apothecary Diaries at least a few times. I am told that Episode 23 contains a significant Go game. (A friend texted me about it and sent the images, I am not that far in the series yet.)

Inkwolf wrote:Go appears in The Apothecary Diaries at least a few times. I am told that Episode 23 contains a significant Go game. (A friend texted me about it and sent the images, I am not that far in the series yet.)

Will watch it because symbology of the game is used throughout the rest of the series metaphorically

Go got an honorable mentioning in an article about string theory in the Quanta Magazine:

When researchers at the artificial intelligence company DeepMind created the AlphaGo algorithm, which in 2016 bested a top human Go player, the physicist Fabian Ruehle took notice.

“I thought, if this thing can outperform the world champion in Go, maybe it can outperform mathematicians, or at least physicists like me,” said Ruehle

It seems the Finnish Nobel prize winner Bengt Holmström (Economic Sciences) had a go board too. Never seen him in the local clubs though.

These photos are fresh from the Nobel Prize Museum: Cheers,
Vesa

There's a 25m video on the Fujitsu FACOM 128B, a post-war relay computer. There's a brief pic of Toshio Ikeda (future head of Fujitsu) by a floor board, in... yukata? The board is old sized (not overly thick, I mean), and the stones seem on the slim side. But it's Go.

Check at 4:41.

Take care.

Inline:

Ferran wrote:But it's Go.

Yeah, Go Seigen indeed

Cheers,
Vesa

Every Friday morning we get a sales flyer from the clothing chain Uniqlo tucked into the Yomiuri Shinbun (along with lots of other stores, etc.). Since most of my clothes come from Uniqlo, I diligently check what is on sale every week while sipping my morning coffee. Yesterday, I got the following. But wait! What's going on here? Why is there someone playing Go amidst my clothing bargain sales? Even more, it isn't some model, it's Ichiriki Ro. Yes, it is really Ichiriki Kisei, modeling a line of cheap suits. Luckily, he managed to win the fifth game of his match with Iyama on Thursday, so he was still the Kisei on Friday!