Interesting. I checked Hannak’s biography of Emanuel, which has a little about his interest in go, but the quote is not cited there so far as I can find (it has no index).
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I suggest you submit the quote to Quote Investigator (https://quoteinvestigator.com/), the most superb researcher of quotes I have ever seen.
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I have thought of doing that in the past, but wondered whether the marvellous Garson O’Toole would be prepared to spend time investigating such a niche quote. In October 2017, I put it to Nigel Rees of BBC R4’s Quote … Unquote, but he didn’t take it up. Reviewing that correspondence now, I notice that I also referred to the quote being the subject of a University Challenge question asking what game was referred to. It was there attributed to Edward, but I noted that that could be because it had been sourced from Wikiquote which names Edward as author (following the AGA).
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Worth a try, I think. You are right to be suspicious. In my experience, when a quote is widely if not entirely unsourced, there is usually a problem with the attribution.
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I’ve found the original, untranslated German quote:
In einer anderen Publikation sagt er: Wenn es im Universum noch irgendwo intelligente Lebewesen gibt, dann kennen sie vielleicht Schach, höchstwahrscheinlich jedoch Go.
“Höchstwahrscheinlich” actually means something more like ‘most likely’.
I find it easier to believe that the English came from the German than vice versa. My hunch would be that an American saw the translation attributed to ‘E. Lasker’ and jumped to the conclusion that that referred to the (more famous in the US go world?) Edward. Of course, it could have been the other way round …
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This greatly tips the balance in favor of Emanuel, I think. The standard quote is a good deal more elaborate and elegant, which marks it as almost certainly derivative (many cases on the Quote Investigator site follow that pattern). The philosophical tone is also something very much in character for Emanuel, who wrote at least one book on philosophy. But it is certainly frustrating to still lack an exact source. By the way that history has some interesting info in it, such as confirming that Emanuel learned go from Edward (which I had read somewhere before).
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The Wikipedia article for Edward discusses how he played the key role in introducing Go to Emanuel. See this section: Edward Lasker - Wikipedia
Besides the potential confusion between Emanuel and Edward, we also have this:
He and his friend Dr. Max Lange (1883–1923) – not to be confused with the more famous 19th century chess master Max Lange
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Yes, I think that is where I read it before.
So, here is my theory about the quote, and I believe I even read somewhere online where someone else had made this claim as well, but I’m having trouble finding it.
Emanuel Lasker may have been the first to write “Wenn es im Universum noch irgendwo intelligente Lebewesen gibt, dann kennen sie vielleicht Schach, höchstwahrscheinlich jedoch Go.”, which is German for “If there are still intelligent beings somewhere in the universe, they may know chess, but most likely Go.” (according to DeepL translate), which the page linked by @StevenageTony attributes to an unspecified publication by Emanuel. Edward would have been well aware of these words, of course.
However, I believe that later Edward further adapted these words into “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.”
Note that Edward immigrated to the United States, where he “was instrumental in developing Go in the U.S.” (according to his Wikipedia article) and eventually co-founded the American Go Association. Note that this organization attributes this longer quotation (let’s call it the “Baroque” version) to Edward Lasker, so it seems unlikely that they would get the attribution of this specific quote incorrect. Hence, I think it is likely that Edward did in fact write the “Baroque” quote, even if it might have been heavily inspired by an earlier and very similar writing by Emanuel in German.
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As I said, the elaborated version was likely derivative of Emanuel’s quote. I didn’t specify Edward because I didn’t want to stigmatize him, especially without evidence, as what some people might consider a plagiarist.
Yes, I was also thinking after my last post that there could be two quotes, one in German, one in English. The two did know each other and in fact discovered they were cousins, as I have read and Edward taught Emanuel go, as mentioned. It seems quite possible that Emanuael wrote those German words somewhere and his cousin propounded the same idea in his own English words, whether or not saying he was explaining his cousin’s belief. Perhaps he simply accepted the thesis and further promulgated it in his own words in the language of his adopted country without necessarily claimijng it as an original idea.
You can’t rely on the AGA’s attribution as definitive, in view of the article you yourself linked above (but via Weiqi To Go), which ends:
Our best go expert sources — Peter Shotwell, Richard Bozulich and Erwin Gerstorfer — have not been able to track down a definitive attribution for this quote. A prize awaits whoever can do so; email us at journal@usgo.org
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Not that I know anything about this, but I think the same debate over the quote also appears on Senseis library
https://senseis.xmp.net/?GreatQuotes
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I’d rather translate “noch irgendwo” as “somewhere else” than “still somewhere” in this case. “Still somewhere” to me sounds like there were intelligent beings somewhere, but now they are more likely dead/extinct and they just might be still alive/existing. But the meaning, that there might be intelligent beings not only here on earth, but “somewhere else” too seems more appropriate.
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Yes, but I think we have already gone deeper, with more accuracy, here.
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Yes, I think you are right. My German is not great, so although I wasn’t comfortable with that “still”, I didn’t have the confidence to offer a better translation as you have (for which, thanks).
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Go memes topic exists for humor posts. But, Atorrante posts a lot of not humor quotes there lately. I think topic for quotes should be created and these posts should be moved from memes topic to quotes topic.
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A meme does not necessarily have to be humorous, although it often is.
In this wikipedia article on meme there is no mention of humour or humor
whatsoever.
But I will not start a new topic called Go Quotes, because I don’t want this quote collection to be scattered over two topics.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_meme
An Internet meme , more commonly known simply as a meme (/miːm/ MEEM), is an idea, behavior, or style (meme) that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms and ESPECIALLY for humorous purposes.
Rather funny that the wikipedia definitions of meme and internet meme are in a sense contradictory.
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