To the non-player, chess and Go seem like similar games. Two people, a board, some pieces, and you get to kill stuff.

I played on my high school’s chess team for 4 years, and even earned a varsity letter for my time and effort. I was ranked second board for at least 2 of those years, yet I never exactly had fun playing. I didn’t like that in order to play exceptionally well, you have to be fairly well-versed in attack and defense pattern sequences that have been analyzed to death by experts over the years. That makes it seem less like a game, and more like taking a final exam in a history class…where’s the fun in that?

I played go for only a quarter during my sophomore year at RIT; I felt inclined to stop when spring quarter rolled around since my schedule felt long enough without the need to drop 2-4 more hours at meetings of the Empty Sky Go Club twice a week (on my long days…grr). It was thanks to Julie Zobel—also a member of the House of General Science—that myself, Matt Chan, Jamil Khan, and Jason Dyer were introduced to the game.

I find that go is nothing like chess. Chess is a battle, whereas go is a war. I don’t know the numbers off the top of my head, but on a purely mathematical level, go is much more complex. Computer scientists can create professional-level chess-playing programs, but designing an AI that can play go well on a 19x19 board has not been done yet (to my knowledge). Go also has fewer rules than chess. ;+)

Once the fall edition of murder started on HOGS, I started spending some of my evenings in Java Wally’s playing and watching Go, since staying away from the floor until at least 11pm each night guarantees “survival” for that day. Even though murder has already run its course, I think I’ll try to play on a regular basis.

It feels odd to play Go again. Most of the little things that I had started to learn feel like echoes of knowledge in the vacant spots of my gray matter. I noticed the other night that I still tend to view the board in the same way I used to look at a chessboard: I look for kills instead of territory. This is a bad habit, since it is territory that decides the winner in a game of Go (though killing does have its merits).

One of the aspects of Go that I do find in striking contrast to chess is that once you have an established ‘living’ structure in Go, you can feel free to ignore it, since there is no way to remove it from the board. In chess, the pieces can move around the board, causing structures to fade into and out of existence. What was protected during one move could be completely vulnerable two moves later; the structure is dynamically shifting. A game of Go evolves in time; living groups have patterns that stagnate, and all other structures fluctuate from one intermediate configuration to the next, striving to live or to kill. The time evolution reminds me of cellular automata.

Since Go is a game of patterns, with each game, players find themselves amid a sea of raw data. Given enough time, will the glimmers of nodal points show their faces?

Nodal points: Points of high interest in an information field.

In William Gibson’s Idoru, Colin Laney has the innate ability to see nodal points by immersing himself in a flow of information. In this case, fiction follows reality.

The most obvious realm that this ability applies to is that of coders and hackers. They immerse themselves in the internal workings of some immense project and try to hold the entire functionality in their mind at once; it makes coding easier when you know exactly what each part of the program can do and where its code is located. When I am in ‘hack-mode,’ sometimes there comes a moment when I recognize that the code base is no longer a beautiful thing; and that by realigning my perspective I can remedy it. I feel like these flashes of correctable elegance come to me due to recognizing nodal points while immersed in the program’s entrails.

Another time this feeling has hit me, was during my studying for the Sophomore CORE. I had to ingest the entirety of my first two college physics textbooks covering such a wide span of topics as: kinematics, thermodynamics, waves & oscillations, light & optics, charges, gravitation, torque, models of the atom, relativity, quantum mechanics, circuits, and magnetic induction. By the end of my studying, everything I had ever learned in my first four college physics classes was occupying my short-term memory. I think the real purpose of the CORE is twofold. Firstly, it is to insure that you know enough about the physics that you were taught to at least tread water in the higher-level classes. Secondly, it’s meant to make you notice patterns that you might not have noticed before: visions of concepts linking themselves together into new hierarchies, forming rudimentary nodal points.

There are more examples of this nodal point concept, but I’ll skip the details and just list a few more:

• Overnight problem-solving.
• Macgyvering: split-second engineering skill.
• The ability to pick up a new language from immersion-teaching.
• A musician’s ability to hear a song and extract its ‘essence’ to use in reimplementation or variation.

I think this entry has been long enough. I might revisit this topic at a later time, after I’ve had time to process my ideas a bit more.

My grand uncle, Del McCoury, is going to be a guest on the Conan O’Brien show on October 7th.

Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Bacon are also guests that night.

Since I’ve met Del before, does this mean that I can lay claim to a loose Kevin Bacon game association now? I should also note that I’m related to Jimmy Stewart.

20th

Like I mentioned before, my mom creates unique birthday cakes. This year, I chose the ‘soap’ from Fight Club.

19th

The Mozilla dragon was for my 19th birthday

18th

The dock scene from Myst was for my 18th birthday

16th

My mother has been making sculpted birthday cakes for me ever since I was born. I simply choose any design, and she carefully crafts it from baking supplies. For my 16th birthday cake, I selected Tux the Penguin, the Linux mascot, because of the little, rotund penguin’s cuteness. Here are some pictures of this “masterpiece.”

a freshly iced tux

a side pic of the cake

the cake with some text

a shrink-wrapped version of linux

In case you are wondering, the cake was a carrot cake.