Go or no Go?

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“Only the body is shed; the mind is forever in the maze of 19 lines.” 

I saw this illustration near the end of the Hikaru no Go manga. It creeped me out, and I think I had reason for that.

I have written occasionally about the relevance of lower worlds – the worlds which we humans create – to the human soul. Back in the 1990es, one of my fellow ardent Daggerfall players pondered whether we might go to Daggerfall when we die. That was both a creepy and alluring prospect in a certain sense: Daggerfall was a truly life-size game, the like of which has perhaps never been seen (although the graphics are less than amazing by today’s standards). As experienced from 1st person perspective, the size of the terrain was around the size of Great Britain – more than enough to live countless lifetimes and yet not stumble across everything. It was a world rich in magic and with varied weaponry, but also ordinary clothes, houses, bookstores, even banks. It seemed reasonable, entirely too reasonable, that a game such as that could trap a human spirit.

I have mentioned the Orthodox philosopher Philip Sherrard and his conviction that the human soul, upon death, brings with it its internal representation of the world. Indeed, it is this internal image of the world which the soul lives in even while alive, although while we live it may be updated frequently through our senses. Once we die, this connection is broken, but the vast internal model of the world remains with us and the soul continues to inhabit it. As such, it seems reasonable to assume that the dead may not even know they are dead, even if they remain conscious in some non-physical medium.

Ryuho Okawa, founder of the Japanese new religion Happy Science, likewise think that dead humans without spiritual experience will quickly forget that they are dead. The Astral Realm, where such souls live, is similar to the physical world. I don’t think Okawa and Sherrard knew of each other – they don’t have much more in common – so I assume this is some tradition that has been around for a while.

It is in light of this that I see the words of today’s picture and imagine the hapless soul trapped in the Go board, unaware that its life on Earth has come to an end, endlessly searching for the Hand of God in the maze of 19×19 lines. I wonder if even Daggerfall, with its night terrors, would not be preferable to such a maze. And yet it is not really a very confined space: The number of different games that can be played on a grown-up’s goban (Go board) far exceeds the number of stars in the observable universe.

Using my imagination, I traveled to an alternate timeline in which I had started studying Go seriously in early 2010, some two and a half year ago. Spending hours each day learning the game, very little would happen at first. For months, I would just routinely lose to the artificial intelligences, being too incompetent to dare challenge a human player. I would however continue to study the newbie advice available on the Net, and eventually beginner books, while trying various tactics against the computer. Gradually I would get drawn into it, until – as has happened with various other activities – I started seeing the game movements with a kind of “third eye” superimposed on the world around me, kind of like you may imagine having glasses that project an image on top of reality. This is the point at which my learning a skill increases dramatically.

Seeing myself today in that alternate timeline, I can’t say I like what I saw. Go is certainly preferable in many ways to the games I tend to play. It disciplines the mind and strengthens the brain, it encourages clear thinking and a deep understanding of cause and effect deployed deep into future time. It is an extremely chaste game, well it is really beyond that concept whatsoever. It is a great way to meet people with a tendency to think. Yes, there is much good to say about it, but nothing good to say about being obsessed with it. For the more you immerse yourself in it, as in any game or sport or even job, the greater is the risk that your mind is trapped forever in a limited corner of existence.

So the answer to my question on top there? Go or no Go? “Neither of the above.” There is no lower world that should be allowed to trap our soul, not even one as pure as the world of Go.

Not quite so happy anymore

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“I didn’t change at all” says Tsubaki, the guy driving the bike. Hikaru, in the back, learned something from every win and every loss. That was the difference between them.

I have been … boasting, or something close to it, about my super happiness for a long time, haven’t I? Recently, I have gradually come to notice that I am not so happy anymore. The intense pangs of joy that seemed inexplicable, they have pretty much stopped. And I don’t feel so upbeat in my day to day life either. Not the constant euphoria.

That is not to say that I am unhappy, or sad, or lonely, or depressed. Far from it. I just feel more… human. I am not sure I can achieve anything more. I am not sure I can make progress. When I look at my recent history, it seems like I am standing still, at best. Or going forward and then back again. I am pacing back and forth in a nice spot, I guess, but it was not quite this I hoped for.

I wanted to get better at my job. Actually, I wanted to get really good at my job. Not to get more pay or a finer title or any of that, but simply to be able to solve more problems for people. I am happy to say that I got an opportunity early this month, when I got to assist the other team for some days when they were swamped because of an external problem. That was nice. But overall, looking back over the last couple years, there is very little progress. I have not really become much better at solving problems in my work. A little, I would say, but it is at a snail’s pace at best. It was not this I hoped for, or intended.

When I look at my personal life, it is much the same. I had hoped to be a better person by now. A purer, less selfish person. Someone able to bless other people rather than thinking about my own wants and wishes. Someone taking up less and giving more. I had hoped to be someone who had the wisdom to help others. But very little has happened. I am not really active in goodness.

I’d like to think it has nothing to do with the fact that I’m no longer living in a small house in the countryside but in an apartment right under asylum seekers or some such which shout and play weird music, sometimes till 2AM on weekday nights. According to my understanding of how the world works, such things should not influence one’s happiness at all. It all depends on the way one reacts. What is a challenge to the worldly person should be an opportunity to refine the soul for those who seek the things above. I just don’t have quite the heart for soul refinery that I thought I had before it was put to the test, I guess!

I mean, a gospel that brings happiness to the rich and those who have good neighbors is not much to write about, is it? The apostles of Jesus Christ sang praises from prison. Socrates and the Buddha used their last minutes to comfort their friends. I just don’t see myself in their place.

That said, to repeat myself, I am not depressed here. Just not ecstatically joyful, see? When I look at the writings of my online friends, or talk with people at work, I realize that I am blessed indeed. I wish I could reduce their unnecessary suffering and turn it to joy. But this is exactly what I cannot do. And so I become like stagnant water, I think. Surely there must be ways to bless others without sharing heavenly secrets that are above my pray grade. Well, I suppose my plan for that was to increase my pray grade, but it is easier said than done… Then again, it was always very easily said, wasn’t it?

Too late for Omega-3

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Double duty picture from City of Heroes! According to science, identifying with superheroes can make you stronger. But unfortunately discoveries like these tend to disappear over time, as if Real Life too was a game that gets patched…

I recently bought another box of Omega-3, the super healthy fat. Unfortunately, I was too late. Before I even got started, science had discovered that Omega-3 does not prevent cardiovascular disease after all. I read it on www.forskning.no. (In Norwegian.)

For some years, it has been known that Omega-3 fatty acids have various beneficial effects on blood vessels, and the way it worked was reasonably well understood. Or so we thought. But there is another effect which is poorly understood, a general law that says that a scientific discovery is likely to disappear gradually over time (the Decline Effect).

This is not true for the basics such as gravity or electricity, but more recent (and more complex) discoveries seem to fall under this surprising law. The first independent attempts to replicate the discovery agree that there really is such an effect, and it is surprisingly strong. Theorist then come up with various ways in which the effect can be explained, and new tests are run to pinpoint these. But meanwhile, the effect becomes gradually smaller, and after some years it disappears. This has now happened to the effects of Omega-3 on heart and blood vessels. While we now finally understand how it works, it no longer works, and we don’t understand why. When we didn’t understand how it worked, it worked well enough.

Around the same time, I read that reduced calorie intake did not prolong the lives of rhesus monkeys. Scientists have tested reduced calorie intake (less than 75% of normal) for a wide range of organisms, from nematodes to mice. They stayed youthful longer and exceeded the maximal life expectancy of their species. The monkeys also stayed youthful longer, but died at the normal time anyway. This is bound to be a slap in the face for the people who have gone on a starvation diet to live to see the Singularity. Well, you may want to be youthful longer anyway, but it bears mention in passing that one of the first effects of long-time calorie restriction is that your sex drive goes off and doesn’t get back until you get your fat back. So I guess prayer and fasting really is a good combination for those who want to stay super chaste. But immortality is not so easily achieved.

The most amusing explanation for the fading scientific discoveries is that Real Life is actually a MMRPG (massively multiplayer role playing game) and that the developers patch any unintentional exploits incrementally after they are published. Hey, the developers over on City of Heroes did this with their Mission Architect system. They would patch one exploit, then someone would discover a less powerful exploit, and it was patched too, and so on until the exploits were so mediocre that most people did not really care one way or another. So perhaps the developers of real life are doing the same.

Or perhaps we are just too eager to jump on anything that seems like a loophole in the laws of nature.

Pearls before swine, lots of pearls

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“The poison of jealousy turns even an angel into a devil.” When we go too high above our pray grade, we unleash a universal Constraining Force, which has the power to enrage the swine around us, or even the swine within. This is a fearful thing to unleash.

Recently I have immersed myself in winter and spring of 2010, rereading my first months in Riverview. I sure wrote a lot of worthwhile spiritual and generally good and useful stuff. I received a lot of revelations, and of course I had some from before, so I just kept writing it down. I am not really sure it has been of help to anyone, but perhaps one day it will be. Who knows?

I read a bit in Mouravieff’s Gnosis again. He mentions that those who are trying to break out of the general law – the inertia of the world – should keep silent about spiritual things. It is natural, he says, to want to talk to everyone about the wonderful things you have found. But it will cause the constraining elements of the world to become aware of you and react in various ways, externally and internally. (Resistance from other people, and temptations.) So while you may not need to literally go through your days silent, you should be silent about the spiritual sights you have just seen. He refers then to Christ’s words about not casting pearls before swine or giving to the dogs what is holy. They will just attack you.

That may be so, but if no one ever mentioned the spiritual things, then it would die with them, is that not so?

Well, that is so, but by and large it should be left to those who have achieved lift-off, I guess. Those who have so little to lose, the constraining forces can do little about them except revile them and kill them, which is not enough at that stage. Christ said at the end of his life that the prince of this world was coming “and he has nothing in me”. That is not the case for us newbies. Whether we think so or not, there is actually a lot in us that can be activated by the constraining force of the ordinary world.

But I keep having this notion that if I throw enough pearls before the swine, sooner or later they will lose their footing and fall flat. Since there seems to be an endless supply of pearls – for when you have been given an internal companion from Heaven, no matter how undeserved, there is no end to what could be said – it seemed reasonable to me that I must say all the words that should be spoken, before they are lost forever.

On the internet, nobody can see if you are a dog. Or a swine. I like to think that there are a few out there who are neither. But if I were to think of myself, and what is best for me, then I should probably keep a lower profile. The more we speak up, the more the constraining force will focus upon us, what the ancients called demons and Satan, which attacks both within through temptations and wild emotions, and without through slander and hostility. In one story written down in the gospel, Jesus Christ drove out unclean spirits from a man, and at once they went into a flock of swine. This is unfortunately so even spiritually speaking, that the swine are always receptive to the negative spiritual influences. The more pearls you throw at them, the angrier they get, unaware that what they are being pelted with is supposed to be valuable. We are not talking cuddly piglets here, a crowd of enraged swine is a fearsome thing indeed.

For a beginner such as I – and this is tragic in itself, to be a beginner after all these years and with all this insight – for a beginner, the constraining force may well completely extinguish the spiritual life if I go too high. This is a fact deeply enshrined in all serious spiritual traditions, and also mentioned in Christianity of course: “and not a new convert, so that he will not become conceited and fall into the condemnation incurred by the devil.” The Devil is the personification of the constraining force, according to Mouravieff. I don’t think it matters here whether you think of the Devil as a person as such, regardless the point stands that it is not something we should mess with just for the hell of it. If we go too far above our pray grade, we become “inflated” as some translations put it, and the constraining force will cause us to fall into damnable actions.

This is not unlike what I experience when I play Go, actually.  See, at the start of a match, it is customary to place stones at strategic spots on the board, with the unspoken intention of declaring the surrounding are one’s own, or to occupy it if you will. But if I start out reaching far into the other side of the board early on, the opponent will react by invading my home territory and cut it apart, and I end up with nothing. Since I am a beginner and don’t have the skill to follow up on bold moves, the best I can do at my present level is to secure a smaller part of the board and wall it off from enemy incursion.

While I believe that my Invisible Friend could easily reveal to me innumerable books of Heavenly wisdom, it is unlikely that I would fail to make a fuss about it, and subsequently be cut to pieces by the constraining force, “an anti-dromedary” as I call it. (Enantiodromia.) When someone who has made a sustained and earnest beginning in spiritual work is gutted like that, the result is usually terrifying. An utter ruin, a destruction on a far more massive scale than the setbacks that anyone can experience in life. I have lived a charmed life so far. Long may it last – but that means not playing Buddha on the Internet.

A lesson from Go

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Evidently the Japanese are not entirely unfamiliar with the Dunning-Kruger effect (“How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments” in the words of the original study).

To get back to something less disturbing, I am still trying to learn Go. I can feel that I have come further than I ever have before. (I try to learn Go every time I have watched the anime series Hikaru no Go. So at least three times now, probably four.) This time, I feel like I have achieved lift-off, in a sense: I can actually watch other people play Go and understand some of what happens. When watching 17-kyu and beginner games, sometime their intentions are pretty transparent: They are trying to cut off the opponent, or capture stones, or avoid getting stones captured. So I watch and think: “He is not going to fall for that. He is going to connect at A, and you will have to play B to save your own group.” And sometimes the other player does fall for it, and I have this unfamiliar feeling of having actually seen something another Go player did not see (even if it was another beginner like me.)

And then I go back to the 13×13 training board against my Galaxy Tab, and it crushes me mercilessly. I don’t see the traps when they are for me, and once it takes the initiative, I never get it back. I am chased and either cut to pieces or besieged in a small territory while the computer reigns most of the board supreme. I guess Go is a lot like real life: It is easier to see what other people should do, but hard to see the same when it comes to myself!

An online friend (or nearly so) has just taken up playing Go as well, and described his first meeting with a Go robot as a lesson in humility. I guess that is one way to put it. Did you know that this ancient board game only has 5 rules, all of the quite simple? You can learn it in a couple minutes. And yet professional Go players have usually practiced for hours a day for a decade or so. Over the course of about 3000 years, no one has been able to master it, to find the sequence of moves that cannot be surpassed, the theory that can win every game.

That is the challenge of one of the world’s simplest games. And yet there are people who think that their amazing powers of logic lets them understand life, the universe and everything. If not in detail, then pretty well. Good luck with that.

Skyrim revisited

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Greetings from Norway… er, Skyrim! Almost the same thing. Here featuring Cerviden the supposed healer.

New computer, new modifications, bad habits.

I had barely touched Skyrim since last year, but three days ago I got the urge to try it on the laptop. I did not expect it to run very well there, it being a laptop and all. (Although I have hooked up a 24″ monitor, USB keyboard and trackball to it in my home office.) But it runs smooth as butter in high resolution. This computer really is something. (Asus N56V.)

I was trying out a couple new mods. Well, one of them was also around last time, in a certain sense: Calientes female body mod, Big Bottom Edition arrived almost as soon as the game did, rendering female bodies looking actually female rather than male bodies with oranges on the chest. But at the time it had the side effect of leaving all females naked if taking off their armor. Now they have underwear (if you insist during installation), and not particularly sexy underwear either, so that is good I guess. I routinely press the “take all” button after defeating enemies. (I use the word “defeat” rather than “kill”, because they certainly don’t seem to be dead in the earthly sense. There are no wounds or burns, and they don’t get rigor mortis. Even if you leave them around for a couple days, they don’t discolor or bloat, and after a couple days, they just disappear while you are not watching. So it seems more similar to City of Heroes where you get fixed up at the hospital at a modest cost if you are defeated. Or that’s what I tell myself.)

A mod I have not seen before is Cerviden – SMART Healer – which is a follower who can be instructed in how to fight, or not. Well, that is the theory. I tell her to stay back, not attack unless attacked, and not use aggressive magic, just cast healing and protecting spells on me as needed. She is all OK with that, but once the battle begins, she forgets and starts attacking the enemies from a distance. This keeps me from trapping their life energies in my crystals, not to mention gaining experience in weapon and armor use. Oh well. She is an amusing companion though, with a lot of voice acted more or less context-sensitive chatter. Probably the funniest companion I have had since the sentient sword in Morrowind. That was a hoot.

I also have downloaded the fairly large Immersive Armors mod, which adds a lot of new armor types to the world. Since many of them are context or level dependent, I have not seen most of them yet.

A quality world map with roads drawn on it makes travel easier. It is a small thing but makes a noticeable difference to “quality of life” in the game.

Finally there is the Guard Dialogue Overhaul, which is meant to make the guards less dumb and more respectful. They now recognize my fame, such as it is, and treat me accordingly. So that is something.

There sure are some amazingly high quality game modifications available for free. As I have said before, the freeconomy is already upon us. (Although some artists accept donations.) As for me, I hope I am not going to use their creations much. I am not particularly proud of having played Skyrim again. The voice in my heart is not impressed either. Stabbing people repeatedly with daggers is a bad habit. And you wouldn’t want to have people in underwear strewn around when angels come to visit, either. Besides, it takes time that I had intended to use for other things.

Still, it is amazing to live in the future. To think that one can visit such a detailed, lifelike imaginary world in one’s own living room! I remember the time when a screen resolution of 320×240 caused my computer to almost overheat. If it gets better than this, I better not enter in the first place, or I might never come back. That would be a great loss, at least to me!

The Great Coincidence

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You’d think anyone would prefer Heaven over Hell, given the choice. There is a good reason why not, though: Heaven is hard. As in, unyielding, solid, not malleable or bendable like the lower worlds. Some years ago I tried to explain this to some friends, and the were like “Have you read The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis?”

I have finally, this late in my life, started reading C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce. I rather enjoy it. It is a “spiritual fantasy” really, not an allegory but not intended as a realistic description of the spirit world, from his own preface. But he is not really hiding the religious content, not after the first few pages.

To me, the book is kind of shocking or unnerving. Not because of its religious implications, but because it is familiar in a completely different way. I wrote quite a bit of it before I knew it existed. And it wasn’t even religious. Not in the least. It was pure science fiction.

I was about 19 years old, I think, when these stories began to tell themselves in my head. They varied somewhat, but they had a common framework. There was this ordinary world, and there was a higher world, “the world above ours”. In my stories, it was a physical world, not a spiritual Heaven where souls went. One ascended to it in a secret cave, using a mysterious ladder that had been placed there in some unimaginable past. The main character who discovered this passageway was in for a rude surprise: The “world above ours” was 20 times more real than ours. Mass was that much denser, energy that more energetic. Even lack of energy, such as cold or dark, were more intense. The only time visiting this world was bearable was just after sunset and sunrise, when it was not cold enough to freeze you to ice and not hot enough to roast you alive. Even breathing the air there was painful, and at first you could not drink the water or even venture out of the cave. It would take repeated visits to gradually begin to absorb some of that more intense reality by breathing it in, before you could carefully begin to explore.

Conversely, after a while the muses in my head added a “world below ours” which was that much less real, so that anyone entering there from our world would be amazingly real at first, but gradually dissipate their reality the longer they stayed there and the more they used it.

Now I pick up this book from 1945 and there is this super-real world where even walking on the grass hurts the poor shades from the lower world, where they find themselves half transparent in the light there. I think the first thing that really creeped me out was the mention of the time of day: The very beginning of the dawn. The same time my own characters were able to visit “the world above ours”. The next was the promise that staying there would help them become able to tolerate the world, that the very nature there would assist them.

Conversely, in the world below, people were able to manifest houses simply by willing them into being, but the houses were insubstantial – in other words, the people had supernatural powers by virtue of being more real than the world, but the world itself was less real. It was an eerie echo of my own fiction from years before I heard any rumors of this book. I think the notion that this vertical stacking of worlds had any spiritual meaning only entered my mind 6-5 years ago, after I had started reading the One Cosmos blog.

My stories were, as I said, not at all religious. But the similarity is still more than enough that any literary agent would have pointed out that this was basically a secular take on Lewis’ book, I am sure. Except I had not even heard of it. (I had read Malacandra – Out of the Silent Planet – somewhere around that time, I think. But that was it. I was in my mid to late twenties when I found my second Lewis book, about Perelandra (Venus) and became aware that he had been a fairly active writer for a while.

Now, some may explain this by saying that when enough people have read a book, a morphic field is created which makes it easier to think the same thoughts. (“The 100th monkey effect”.) Or you may say that the spirit of Lewis inspired me from Heaven, because I was in my own way fairly innocent and had a similar temperament to him in his better years. But most would surely say that it is a coincidence. One of the innumerable coincidences that abound in my life. Sometimes I feel that being a Viewpoint Character is a bit like being ta’veren (in the Wheel of Time universe): Strange things happen around you frequently, but you cannot control them or even predict them. Even, it seems, when I am the one doing them!

But it sure is a huge coincidence, don’t you think?

City of Heroes closing down

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Well, at least it seems America will outlive its (original and best) superhero game.

I logged on to Virtue, my favorite server on City of Heroes, for a little superheroing. It has been a couple weeks since last time, I guess. There were a bunch of people outside the City Hall in Atlas, where I usually log out. They seemed to be protesting something?

They were, it turned out, protesting the closure of the game, which is due for November. I had not heard anything about that. That was certainly unexpected: There were recently released a couple new power sets, and the number of users has been fairly stable for a while now. But evidently NCSoft is restructuring to focus on their [buzzword], which presumably means Korea, so Paragon Studies in America got the ax. I can see a certain logic in that. America is in decline. In a few years, it will join the Soviet Union and the British Empire as fond memories of a glorious past, I expect. Owning such an arch-typical American game will be a liability for an Oriental corporation in the new Asian dawn.

Still, it would be kind of nice if they could sell it instead. It is probably a bit late for that now, though. Customers will start drifting away. Well, after they finish today’s great rally on Virtue. There were 33 instances of Atlas Park when I left, filled with protesters holding signs or torches. Thousands of people making one last try to change the mind of people half way around the world. Good luck with that.

Perhaps I should log on some of my favorite characters and take some final screenshots before it is over? The game had great graphics and was one of my favorites for screenshots from before it even opened. Yes, I played from the closed beta onward. But it so happens that I have begun to play it less and less over the last two years or so. Not because of the game, which has grown steadily better. It is truly awesome by now. But I spend less time gaming now, I guess. Well, except for Go, currently, but I will probably give up that pretty soon. Anyway, that part of my life was slowly fading away already. So it is kind of convenient for me that this is when it ends. Still, it is a shame. It was a great idea and well executed. There is nothing quite like it. I doubt I am going to play any MMORPGs again after this one. Certainly not any from NCSoft.

The Go Teaching Ladder

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“People only learn from mistakes when they are hurt by them” says Fujivara no Sai. I disagree. At the Go Teaching Ladder, you can learn from other people’s mistakes. In contrast, I don’t seem to learn from my own, even when they hurt – at least in Go.

A place where Go players can learn and teach at their leisure.

During my current Go (igo) fad, I have made my way to the Go Teaching Ladder. It is a website and database based on a simple but great idea: People can get their matches reviewed by someone who is more skillful than themselves, while also reviewing the matches of those ranked lower than themselves. For instance, if you are a 10-kyu player, you could review the game of a 20-kyu gamer and have your own latest match reviewed by a 1-kyu player.  (Actually the difference from 10 to 1 is greater than from 20 to 10, I would say. Progress is easier at the bottom. Well, once you get started, I guess. I still can’t seem to get it.)

By using this system, only the ones at the bottom are only receiving, and only those at the very top are only giving. And even that is not exactly true. You see, not only is it a well known fact that teaching makes your own understanding more solid. In the case of Go, there is also the element that Go is not a single skill. Some players are strong in the mid-game, others in the endgame. Some play logically, calculating possible future moves; others are intuitive, reacting to the shapes and patterns formed by the stones on the board. Some play more aggressively, others more defensively. Some rely on remembering a vast library of standard responses, while others prefer to think for themselves with every move they make. Because of this and more, you can be better than a player at nine moves in a row, and then the tenth amazes you with its brilliance. So reviewing someone moderately below you can still give you a bunch of new ideas.

Best of all, the reviewed games are stored in an archive for anyone to download and watch. It uses the .SGF format, which can be used by a number of programs to play back the moves on a visual Go board on the screen, with comments on the side and pointers on the board and alternative play sequences shown. The standard program from Pandanet, GoPanda, can also load these files. (The same format is used when you want to look back over your old games that you have played on the IGS.) GoPanda is written in Java so it probably runs on several non-Windows computers as well.

I have downloaded a few games, mainly such where a low-level match was reviewed by a high-level player. I was hoping that some of the mistakes were similar to mine and some of the advice was relevant to me. Wouldn’t that be nice. So I read a couple reviews, got a number of great ideas, and fired up a new game on my Galaxy Tab, still on the easiest level. It crushed me just as easily as before. Not only am I unable to learn from my mistakes, it seems I am unable to learn from other people’s mistakes as well, even when they are thoroughly documented and an alternative approach is spelled out. I must have lost close to a dozen games by now!

A dozen games? What happened to the 20 000 games I was suppose to lose, getting butthurt every time? Well, that was to become a master player. I am just saying, it should be possible to see or feel some progress after spending hours each day for several days studying Go. Perhaps I have an anti-talent, perhaps I am immune to Go somehow. I saw this guy at the Internet Go Server just recently, who had won 2100 games and lost 2400. He was 17-kyu (the lowest that is recognized on IGS) and struggling against someone in the beginner class (everything below 17k, basically). So after playing over 4500 games, he was still clinging to the bottom like a sea star. That is kind of sad. I wonder if that was someone who started playing Go in his later years as well? Or someone with an anti-talent, like me?

But for everyone else, the Go Teaching Ladder seems like a great resource.

Butt, meet ice

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“Since I was small I have played hours of Go everyday, no matter how painful, I played Go.” Why would anyone play painful games? Why do people get butthurt several times a day, year out and year in?

Geoff Colvin, in his book Talent is Overrated, has calculated that before you become an Olympic figure-skater, you will have fallen on your butt on the cold hard ice at least 20 000 times, probably much more. No matter how talented you are, there are things the human body can only gradually be shaped into doing, through relentless effort day after day, month after month, for years. I hope those skaters have some kind of pillow on their butt the first 10 000 times at least, because there sure isn’t much protection when they actually perform.

No, I have not suddenly taken an interest in figure skating. I have suddenly taken an interest in the ancient board game of Go, and could not help but compare my situation. I have been reading several tutorials, watched numerous live games at different levels, read up on strategies and solved problems. And when I play against my Galaxy Tab at the easiest level, it cuts me to pieces. I once managed to secure about a third of the board by defending tightly, but it took the rest. If I try for more, it slices me to pieces. That hurts.

I used to always be the smartest guy in my class. Once I moved away from my second cousins, I used to be the smartest student in my class. From high school onward, I used to at least sometimes be the smartest person in my class, teacher included. I was somewhere between the smartest of a hundred and the smartest of a thousand, back in the days. I have not got Alzheimer’s yet, and not slipped on a banana peel and hit my head. The younger generation has crept up on me, that is true; they are smarter than mine was. But I am still not stupid, I like to think. And then this happens. Over and over again. I just can’t learn Go, it seems. Even if I read it from different angles and think I understand it, the moment white invades my territory, I have no idea what to do next. Or if I have, it does not work. My butt meets the cold, hard ice of reality and it hurts.

As I implied in my recent entry about GURPS and real life, I am used to following this principle: “If at first you don’t succeed, try something else; there are lots of things you’ll succeed at right away.” That’s how I’ve lived my life, for the most part. I am used to picking up things easily. It worked before. But this time, I try again – and I still don’t get it. I hope this is not how my life is going to be from now on out. I feel like an ordinary human. It is not a good feeling. Ordinary humans have my sympathy. An abstract and remote sympathy, for the most part. Until now, at least.

Now I wonder: If I try, try, try again – if I do my best and still lose 20 000 times – will I really become a master? Or is talent underrated, and you either got it or not? Am I simply too old? One thing is pretty sure: By the time I have lost 20 000 times, the processing power of the average Android tablet will have risen tenfold. So there is a pretty good chance I’ll still be limping off the scene rubbing my hurting butt, ten years from now.

Or I could do something more meaningful, I guess. If at first you don’t succeed, ask yourself whether it is really worth it…