What real - life situation would you use as an analogy to Go?

My favourite analogy is that you have a big Antarctic beach and it’s full of elephant seals. Every inch of this beach is covered in elephant seals, and they’re big and fat and very angry. Every seal needs enough space and none of them have got it, so they shove and push each other, goring with their tusks and driving the weaker seals into the ocean. The groups on the board are like those seals.

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Some are made for the ice, some are made for the ocean. :woman_shrugging:

Good comparison. Actually almost any episode of Sillicon Valley is a good representation of an average GO game.

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A life must have some purpose. Like family, space travel, music, Jesus, pancakes, money, or anything really. Living just for the sake of living is worse than death. Just like on goban. Live to win.

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I will not deny nor confirm that I found this honestly inspiring.

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I found this amusing simile, which gives me an excuse to necro the thread.

Thinness is like a sleazy dress - They’re very delicate and if clinging against someone, easily sliced to ribbons. If you’re out to kill something, try thinking more Victorian: thick, constricting, and covers up a lot of things.

Agilis, 2005

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Looks at wardrobe; looks at game history. Looks at shoe collection. Looks at game history again. Looks at rank. :woman_shrugging:

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Clearly we need to closely study what professionals are wearing in that thread.

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I’ve been thinking lately Go Strategy is very much like street gangs trying to beat each other for more territories. To achieve that, sometimes, they kill, sometimes they negotiate and compromise, very much like playing Go.

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Quite often in life the problems/issues you are running into are not formulated well. (Contrary to what you’d expect for example in a mathematics exam in school.)
Often it’s hard to even figure out what the problem is and how to approach it. Sometimes it’s difficult to realize that there actually is a problem at all!
You may sense that there is something wrong or strange at least, not really knowing what it really is.
Can be stressful and frustrating at times!

The game of Go is very much like that. Very often you feel this uncertainty, this feeling of being completely lost.

It takes significant courage to move on in this sea of uncertainties, to take risks, to make decisions and to stick to them.
Very similar to challenges you are facing in real life as well.

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A divorce

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A few years ago I spent a week planting trees in the Highlands of Scotland with the charity organisation ‘Trees for Life’, helping to restore the Caledonian Forest. While doing this I discovered my first analogy of ecological restoration with playing go.

For some reason planting a tree felt a bit like plonking a go stone on the board! I think it was partly because we were encouraged to follow our instincts with regards to the placement of the trees, leaving just enough spacing - trying to mimic the kind of semi-random layout that would occur naturally.

– starline, 2004 (but not our forum Starline)

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