Why would you call the longest of these ages an “interregnum”? The word implies that a succession of rulers is interrupted for a bit longer than one would expect, so nothing important happens. But if this state of affairs lasted longer than whatever happened fore and aft, it should get it’s own proper name.
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Ah, I see, thanks for the info c:
@Sanonius Well, it’s the time between the first and second Kisei, right? And tbh not a lot important did happen in the 18th century Go world. We could always call it Pre-Classical.
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I can’t remember now where I’ve read this but I recall something about Go being thousands of years old also. I recall that it was an unsurity, that finding a gridlike board with stones is common, and there’s nothing that verifies that it’s at all what we would consider Go. I remember reading that because of Go’s fundamentals it is plausible that something similar could be played by lifeforms outside our known existence.
There’s good chance I read all this on a wikipedia. I only own two Go books and they are both on playing, not history.
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It’s difficult to speculate what other intelligent lifeforms would be like, or whether they would even play games like we do. However, there is this quote from Edward Lasker that expresses the sentiment that you mention.
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
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Ah, that was exactly it. It’s so simple, ya know.
Well put.
But if Go is so universal and logical then why didn’t we invent it in Europe, Egypt, the Middle East etc.? Of course there has to be a time quota: “Given enough time, a group of people with leisure will invent Go.” But we don’t know how much time is required because our sample size is one!
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Let’s assume that Go is 3,000 years old (as a compromise) and say that humans began having leisure about 8,000 years ago (sometime between the start of agriculture and the invention of writing).
That gives us a time of 5,000 years in China and the Orient. Let’s take each of the continents in which Go wasn’t played until the 19th century (minus Antarctica because it’s uninhabited) and say they spent 8,000 years not playing Go.
The average is (8000 x 5 + 5000) / 6 = 7,500 years. This is what our experience as humans suggests is the lower bound of the average time for a society to invent Go.
That said! If we define humans attaining leisure time as the point at which we start finding game boards or people talking about games, then we get a much lower number that I can’t work out because I know pretty much nothing about American or Australian games.
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The rules of # o x aren’t less simple, and everybody knows it. I’m sure aliens know tictactoe, no go, tho.
This makes to think some very practical aspects of the game, like how do you teach new players and the logistics about it.
First, although the board is fairly easy to make, but making several hundreds of the roughly same shape and sizes, not too light and too heavy stones, with two different colors (and the colors have to stick to the stones pretty well) would be pretty time consuming and costly. Some sources claim that in early days, people don’t just use black and white colors but other more distinct colors like red for stones, I think it could be cheaper and easier to produce “cheap stones”, using carved wood pieces and paint them instead of actually finding stones of the right colors and painfully carved them out piece by piece. The early form of the game set would most likely be a game for quite wealthy man to even consider owning and playing.
The second question is how do people at the time record and teach games to new players. The timing of widespread records of Go in East Han dynasty (along with many inventions that can be fairly certain to have records) happened around the same time as the “invention” of the mass producing of cheap paper. Before that, “paper” that can be used to write or draw as a large flat surface are in the form of silk cloth, which are extremely expensive, and the cheaper alternative are bamboo and wood sticks before East Han dynasty (imagine recording games or writing teaching materials on that). So most likely the reason for we have good records for games and widespread to more people must have correlation with the access of cheap paper, where finally the recording and teaching can be written and draw easily. Before that, the common way to learn to play Go most likely would be one-on-one face to face lessons with a teacher that have a game set at hand. The learning curve of the game must be very steep.
Another interesting tale is that from the earlier recorded Go book we have known today, they all refer to military strategies and philosophy in them. I can imagine, part of its origin must be related to military use. I believe Go is a mixed of some ancient form of strategy planning tools with ancient astrology recording/reading tools. We know in ancient time, people believe the sky will reflect what would happen on the ground, even in battle field. So it stands for reason that nobleman as military leaders would have “portable” astrology recording tools that they can use to look at the sky and quickly place them on the ground to interpret them. Before cheap papers are available, It would most likely be some kind of grid board with stones that represent stars. And in strategy planning we would need to have pieces representing different sides. And the mostly fixed shapes but slightly shifting positions depending on the latitude as well as the changing of the part of the visible sky depending on the hours and the time of the years would also explain the uncommon feature of Go where once a stone is placed it can not be moved (That is the “original” ancient forms of Go might be strategy snapshots of the battlefield plan, where generals try to mimic the night sky stars’ shape with their battles, just a thought)
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Nice response, I really like your thoughts on this 
In other words, Go might be more artificial and presupposing a human society of some advanced level (i.e. knowing warfare and astrology. Not that I think of that as very progressive) than we think? With the given materials, a grid and two sets of coloured pips, a game like ‘connect five’ might indeed be more likely to evolve among ‘simpler’ societies.
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I’ve been teaching my niece and nephew playing Go the past year, while my niece is older and able to learn it, my nephew who is much younger always tried to move the pieces and place them somewhere else on the board (even inside the grid). And while he understand the rules of pieces being surrounded are “dead”, he simply didn’t grasp why he couldn’t move them and place them somewhere else.
When I tried to play by his “rules” just to entertain him, I suddenly realized we were playing some forms of checker games or nine men’s morris (more specifically some kind of 方棋 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fangqi).
Considering we know variations of morris have very ancient history, and there are many kinds of “cross and circle” games through out the worlds, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cross_and_circle_games, I believe that naturally evolved “board games” should start with some forms similar to them where the rules are somewhat “flexible” and boards themselves can be varied, allowing the gradual changes over time, while Go is unique in a lot of its rules and somewhat rigid. It might have been “evolved” in its original form when it was transformed into a game, but once its unmovable placement rule, and the simple alive and death essence were made unambiguous, all the rituals or complex rules associated with its origin might just got lost over time (some shadows of its ancient complex rules still exist in Tibetan Go and Sunjang Baduk though, with preset placements and different values of different pieces in different places, etc. But difficult to tell how many variations were added or reduced across time).
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It may be true that in our modern world, where time is short, a set of stones is a relatively expensive prospect. But, if I had a day to spend on the beach, or on the side of a large river, I am fairly confident I could gather a set of stones before the sun went down. One set light gray and the other darker. In truth, they don’t have to be nearly as perfect as the clam and slate producers would have you believe. The game still works with significantly under-sized or even grossly over-sized stones.
To wit: Playing Go IRL pictures - #419 by Plum_Talk
For a ‘board’, simply drawing in the mud or sand with a sharp stick would do the trick, but hurry up because I’m tired of looking for rocks and want to sit down and play already!
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Thanks for bumping this thread. I’ll have to reread it now, I remember it having been quite interesting.
Now that it has been bumped, I might as well post the version I made in October on SL.
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On the topic of the perfection of stones, I was recently having a pretty broad and detailed discussion on Discord of many possible reasons for the success of chess over Go in Europe and the Islamic world.
One of the reasons I suggested was that whilst an imperfect set of stones can be gathered very cheaply, as you said, it takes a lot of time and effort to make fairly perfect ones from slate and shell. Sure, yunzi and especially ceramic stones are cheaper, quicker and easier to make, but the fact’s still there.
In contrast, chess in the Islamic world (which is from where it came to Europe) used non-representational pieces, because of iconoclastic religious tradition. Instead of having to carve rather complex figures like horses and castles, all the pieces were radially symmetrical and quite cylindrical, being distinguished by the type of undulations (that is to say the curves, or rather “peaks” and “valleys”) in their shapes.
This would’ve made chess pieces very easy to produce to a perfect standard on a lathe. So in, say, modern day Pakistan a thousand years ago, the competition would’ve been between 1) perfect but rare Go sets 2) imperfect but common Go sets and 3) perfect and common chess sets. Advantage to chess.
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Check it out. Now imagine that all the pieces are almost as easy to make as a pawn.
I was looking for a picture of the old style of set, but for now all I could find was the Vienna / Austrian / Coffeehouse style. Note how the king, queen, and bishop are more radially symmetrical than would be usual today.
Wood is also very scalable in price point. As we know, a piece of wood the size of a floor goban can cost anything from, what, $10 of cheap DIY pine to $10,000 of exquisitely marbled ancient Japanese cedar from the most remote island, laboured over by the most skilful craftsman… If wood is your material, you can pitch down the market with a cheap timber or further up it with something like sandalwood, so that way the game can diffuse more across social standing.
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Maybe that’s the real reason for chess’s popularity, relaxing lathe videos.
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This conversation makes me think about two interesting ways that shogi and xiangqi (Chinese chess) equipment minimised production cost.
In both cases, you 1) don’t need any variation in piece shape or size 2) don’t even need different colours of ink.
Both games, of course, differentiate piece ranks by character. But they have different methods of telling apart whose pieces are whose: shogi uses direction, with the pointy end of the piece supposed to face the enemy, and xiangqi has character variation since its pieces are just discs.
Xiangqi pieces:
| Piece | Colour | Character | Colour | Character |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| General | Black | 將 | Red | 帥 |
| Advisor | Black | 士 | Red | 仕 |
| Elephant | Black | 象 | Red | 相 |
| Horse | Black | 馬 | Red | 傌 |
| Chariot | Black | 車 | Red | 俥 |
| Cannon | Black | 砲 | Red | 炮 |
| Soldier | Black | 卒 | Red | 兵 |
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Also @bugcat It is with some trepidation I admit to you that I have never attempted to create a set of go stones. I have, however created a chess set which does not conform to the radial design aesthetic, but instead follows my own rectilinear shape language, which is the name I use for that larger body of work: Shape Language. I am not the first to come up with that term, I hasten to add…
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