How I Learn

Learning the New Game of Daisen

Some mornings in Cambridge MA I have the chance to play Go with the young woman of the house that I visit when I am here. Well not Go really, she is only six, so instead we play Gomoku, the open version of tic-tac-toe played on a Go board. In Gomoku one tries to place five of one’s own black or white stones in a line of five. Some surprising and beautiful patterns can arise in Gomoku, more linear than Go of course, which is the spatial strategy game par excellence, but more intimate as well. This gave us the idea for a new ‘game’ to play on the Go board.

We call the game Daisen from the first three letters of her name and three letters from my own name. There is at least some inspiration from the old Surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse and also of playing duets on the piano where one person plays the white keys the other plays the black (yes, I have seen people do this, and it is easier to do when not drunk).

The rules are simple. One player plays white, the other black. Each player takes a turn placing a stone on the intersections of the grid (as is normal with games played on a Go board). No conversation is allowed, Daisen is to be played in silence, or with some friends improvising music in the background. The idea is to work together to create an image.

The first game of Daisen near its end.

There are several strategies. In our first game we riffed off each other playing beside each other’s’ stone. There was a real feeling of give and take here, but also a pushing as each player tried to guide the emerging pattern.

Our second game was quite different.

Here we played away from each other, only gradually making an approach. We both knew, I think, that we were working towards an impression of a dragon. This is not surprising. The year of the dragon was approaching (it is here now) and my partner is closely related to the famous dragon trainer Ysiad.

One can imagine other strategies. Each player could play in a quarter of the board, developing patterns independently until they began to infiltrate the other. Or one could play in much more repetitive patterns, stitching across the board together a is the case with some of the common Joseki. There may even be Joseki for Daisen, though I have no idea yet what these might be.

Could one build sequences of Ko in Daisen? Would the result be a living and changing board, some simple version of the Game of Life? Could the Game of Life be played as a game of Daisen? I don’t know, but Ysiad may.

One can learn more about the Game of Life on Wolfram Alpha.

Playing Go Against Myself

I started to play Go again a couple of years ago. I had played intensively when young in Japan, going to Go clubs and playing against some decent players (5 and 6 Dan, who of course crushed me) and when I moved to Boston in October 2006 it was one of the things that I began to do again. I started to play games against myself as a way to regain my board sense and to get a feel for the stones and patterns, but it has become one of my favorite ways to relax (after cycling of course).

Playing a game of perfect information (a game where chance does not play an explicit role and all information is available to all players) against oneself is a good way to stay honest. When playing other players I sometimes try to lead them into traps or take advantage of their miscues. I don’t think this is a good way to play, and it leads to bad habits that stronger players can exploit, but as I like to win I sometimes fall into the mental trap of exploiting other’s weakness. I can’t do this when I play against myself – I am not quite that schizophrenic – so playing against myself means taking turns at finding the absolute best move for black then white, assuming (is that the right word?) that my opponent has as much insight into the board as I do (I hope so, since my opponent is me).

This makes the game one in which the goal is to seek balance and to find patterns. Each move made into a place of deep repose where all of the different tensions on the board are resolved as best I can, and each moving setting up its own new potentials. I am learning a lot doing this, not just about Go, but about the relations of spatial to temporal patterns and how they can disrupt each other.

Sometimes the play can go quickly, when the call and response is obvious or when I am working through Joseki  I know well. Sometimes I even stop and look up Joseki online at sites like Sensei's Library .

Usually the games are pretty close, ten points either way, with black having the edge. But some times the game cascades in one direction or the other and black or white gets a massive victory. There is something important for me to learn here, but I am not completely sure what it is. There is something about this experience that reminds me of self-organizing criticality, where a system seems to suddenly take control and organize itself. It is also a good reminder than small choices can cascade into larger patterns and that these will not always seem to be fair.

(Photo by Yoshie Hattori)