Hi Uno,
It seems like the introduction spends a lot of time on the chess comparison, ultimately arguing for the superiority of Go, for reasons I generally agree with but may not captivate your audience. Or maybe it will, I don’t know. I’m very curious to read what else you have to say about the philosophical implications of Go.
Rereading the piece I feel like you could improve the ordering or flow to clarify the argument you want to make. I’m reading: chess is complex and symbolic, but actually chess is inferior in these qualities compared to go, but actually it turns out computers can beat humans at go also. But I think: there’s not a perfect correspondence between how many moves are possible, how symbolic an activity is, how edifying it is to play, whether computers can do it, and whether the best computer can beat the best human.
Again, you have good material but I think it needs some massaging for flow and cohesion.
This seems to be the big idea that you’re after:
This is the most sophisticated board game ever created by human intellect, and it takes more than simple calculation. It requires something far beyond logical reasoning, like intuition and creativity — the exclusive privileges of being human.
Or so we thought.
In Go, however, as far as the pieces are concerned, there is no inherent hierarchy of value built into them. They are all the same. One stone is one stone no matter what, and it all depends on you to make your move worthwhile — whether it be a king of a move or a pawn of a move depends solely on you.
There are only stones that unequivocally reflect your value judgment, from one moment to another. You are your own king, queen, bishop, and pawn fighting your own battle, from the beginning to the end. Thus, it is like music — each note either resonates in harmony or dissonates in conflict with previous notes and the notes that follow.
So, this is the idea that I personally hope you will expand on as you continue to write.
Even here I think you can tone down the chess comparison a little bit (and maybe you will in the rest of the book) since a chess advocate could easily argue that the art of the chessboard has to do with much more than the fixed value of the pieces. It has to do with relationships and potentialities which in some ways are more complex than a simple count of ‘how many moves are possible’ would reveal.
By the way, the dynamic French philosophy duo Deleuze & Guattari contrasted chess and go, maybe in a similar way, using some of their idiosyncratic vocabulary:
Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the state apparatus in the context of the theory of games. Let us take chess and Go, from the standpoint of game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of the State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game’s form of interiority. Go pieces, I contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function: “It” makes a move. “It” could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very different in the two cases.
This article looks like it would be relevant if you can extract it from behind that paywall.
The relatively higher number of possible plays in Go doesn’t move me, much, relative to other aspects of the game. 9x9 Go differs from chess anyway. And is a 25x25 Go game really that much more profound than the traditional game on a 19x19 board? Again, I don’t think you need to belabor this point, which most people will just read as one impossibly big number versus another impossibly bigger one.
I suppose you are driving at a reconciliation of these ideas that will explain why Go matters to humans even when computers can win against us every time. But maybe I want a smoother logical progression on the journey to that destination.
Your writing is interesting to read so I say this just in the spirit of being helpful, that to me it sounds a little chatty or slangy for what I’d expect in a philosophy book. Maybe it’s fine but maybe there are places where you could use more precise language to convey more to the reader. For example, you wrote that the Go players were chilling then you wrote that they were chillaxing, and that is meaningful, but maybe you wanted to say, they remained confident in their superiority to computers (and to chess players). After all, the Go game may be very enjoyable to play but it doesn’t necessarily produce a state of chillaxation. 
Hopefully this comment makes sense, I’m sure it could also use some editing for flow and cohesion but … uh … make of it what you will.
Kudos to you for getting this far with the book, good luck with the rest of it, and thank you for sharing it with us!
