Go, make your move
By Maria Puente
USA Today
What is that strange board game Russell Crowe plays in "A Beautiful Mind"?
Illustration by Martha Hernandez • The Honolulu Advertiser
It's "go," a 4,000-year-old game that originated in China and is still wildly popular in much of Asia. Until recently, hardly anyone knew it in the United States.
An estimated 100 million people worldwide play Go, a classic Asian strategy game based on intellectual dominance. It has been around for about 4,000 years.
But even before the movie came out in December — and won best drama at Sunday's Golden Globe Awards — there has been a modest resurgence of interest in the game in the United States, in part because of the growing Asian population.
"Before, a go set would sit on my shelf for six months. In the last one or two years, we're starting to see them fly out the door with chess sets, Chinese checkers and other real-wood board games," says Mondo Blake, owner of the Name of the Game store in Camarillo, Calif.
Like chess, go is a game of strategy played on a board crisscrossed by a grid. Each player has 180 lens-shaped "stones" to move around 361 line intersections. The goal is to gain the most "territory" by surrounding and capturing the other player's stones.
"It has more of an Eastern philosophy," says Chendao Lin of the American Go Association. "A go player is not (playing) to take all, but to create more for himself."
The association waxes eloquent on its home page (www.usgo.org): "Go can take on other meanings to enthusiasts: an analogy with life, an intense meditation, a mirror of one's personality, an exercise in abstract reasoning or, when played well, a beautiful art."
Enthusiasts say go is easy to learn, fun to play and impossible to master (there are said to be an infinite number of possible moves); even computers get stumped.
"It's a very abstract game that involves the ability to calculate (in your head) very complicated possibilities," says William Cobb, a player in Richmond, Va., and a publisher of books about go. That's why programmers, mathematicians, engineers and other analytical types are big fans.
Thus, in "A Beautiful Mind," go is used to signal the audience that Crowe's character is a genius hovering on the edge of madness. The movie is based on the true story of a brilliant mathematician, John Forbes Nash Jr., who dazzled international academia in the 1950s only to descend for decades into the horrors of paranoid schizophrenia. But through sheer force of will, he battled his delusions and won. In 1994, he was awarded a Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking work on the mathematics of competition — game theory — at Princeton. In the movie, Nash is shown in a fierce go competition with his fellow math students at Princeton. (The university still has a go club on campus.)
The game also has turned up on CBS' "JAG," about military lawyers, and in the movie "Pi," about a math genius who builds a supercomputer at home.
Go is sold by importers and in many toy and game stores. The game goes for as little as $20 or as much as $10,000 for a set made with high-quality wood and stones of black slate and white clamshells.
