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Naustin
PageType: HomePage
Howdy! I play as naustin on IGS and NathanA on KGS. I am somewhere between 20-11k depending on which relative ranking scale you are looking at. I am interested in philosophy and feel that go is full of this. Philosophy and Go. I used to play alot of chess but I have played go off and on since I was in 5th grade or so. (I'm now 26). One of the things I love about go is that no piece or intersection is different. Of course the corners have a sort of mystery and the sides are different than middle points in a way but it is more a difference of quantity than quality. Yet when there is a position on the board every intersection becomes differentiated, some subtly so and others wildly though they may be very near or far apart like chaos theory. I am also fascinated by the way metaphorical concepts like shape or taste are used to organize knowledge. There are endless ways that go can serve as a metaphor for life or life situations and issues. I have been using the internet a lot more and have been more stable in terms of my living arrangements so have had opportunities to get more involved in the game than I have in the past. Seeing sites like this that I have been spending more time at has been a lot of fun. This is almost like my internet club. See FaceToFaceVsInternetGo. I used to like baseball a lot but after the strike have lost interest. Sites like gobase and tournaments on IGS have allowed me to feel some sense of being a fan again. There are different players to root for. Historical heroes to find out about. Stats to compare. Interesting dramas etc. It's a lot like looking at baseball cards when I look players up on gobase. It's awesome! Recently I have gotten interested in the concept of style of play. Some of the links at Philosophy and Go touch on some of this mostly on game aspects. I learned about Go from Japanese authors (writing in English) and from people who taught the Japanese cultural aspects of the game. Recently there seems to be another "national style" in ascendancy. What I have heard referred to as a Korean style is more focused on fighting and tactical combination. I wonder what an American style would be like. I wonder if there is a philosophical style (that's meant to be somewhat ironic). I have been trying to think about what it would mean for me to develop a personal style of play. I feel I have had some success at the thinking part of this. I have not really translated into game play yet let alone sucess. As a player I know I am interested more in strategic concepts. Don't get me wrong. I know that when I study life and death or tsume go I play better but I find it boring. I like when I get a kill or something because I apply an idea from studying but often the studying seems less than fun. I have been trying to play more exchanges in my games because I realized I was trying to take everything and losing alot. Greedy go I guess that's called. So that's a negative aspect of my charachter of play I have tried to change. I have avoided studying joseki for the same reason as with tsume go. I like the idea of trying to set up a joseki that relates to the fuseki you are playing but the actual work of studying joseki seems daunting and I have read warning after warning about studying joseki too early and carelessly. I have a hard time with something like joseki because often the judgments seem very arbitrary to me. I am willing to admit this may be just because I am not experienced enough to have a sense of the value of smaller dis/advantages. I am also interested in studying individual proffessional more. Trying to find one or two pro's who have a style I would like to learn from and try to emulate them in my games not rigidly but seeing how they would view different situations.
I hope to play go and to be able to learn about and from it for a long time. I think having a page here will be fun too. My mind has already started imagining different things that I could do with this. Well thanks for reading, hopefully we can play some time! SnotNose: I think you have a lot of interesting ideas and things to say. Many of them resonate with my own thoughts regarding the game, especially your ideas about go as language. I'll throw out a wacky idea for you to consider (feel free to reject it). What if we began a game on SL for the purposes of exploring philosophical ideas? How might this work? Perhaps as the game progresses, we could talk about the ideas it conjures up in our minds and how it connects to ideas like balance, power, fear, etc. We could talk about what moves are communicating, strategically/tactically but also more philosophically/emotionally. I'm not sure how successful we could be at this, but I'm open to trying it out. I'm not sure I agree with your idea that the intersections are somewhat equivalent, before any moves are played. Due to symmetry, there are, of course, many intersections that are equivalent to one another. But I think the character of the intersections are very different in and of themselves, due to their proximity to the edge/corner. Imagine the board as a very big room (maybe a big field actually, but with a super high wall all around). You're wandering through this big field. While in the center, it looks the same in all directions. Maybe you can't even quite see the boundary walls from the middle (this is a big big field!) Nothing but meadow all about, uniform. No trees. No rocks. No streams. (None of these because no moves are played yet!) You feel the openness and the possibility. What will this vast, empty space become? Then you wander toward one of the giant walls that enclose the space. As you get near you begin to feel its power and size. Closer still and the wall blocks the sun. You feel smaller as you approach the wall. When you get really close you feel the coolness of the stone in the wall. You touch it and feel death and shudder. "I don't want to get crushed against this wall," you think. But, you're curious so you walk along the wall and eventually come to a corner. The corner is an order of magnitude more powerfull than an edge. You feel like the smallest of beings in the corner. But then you notice that you can get very comfortable in this corner. You feel some degree of safety with those big walls on two sides. You have some rope and you attach it to the two walls, making a diagonal chord. You string up a hammok. You take a rest there. When you feel rested, you wander back out the center. But the corner is your base, your home. You can live there... The areas of the board feel different to me, even with no stones. They resonate with possibility, as described, metaphorically, above. SnotNose: I share your skepticism about a game that illustrates philosophical ideas. The only reason I propose it is that I am a bit skeptical about the rigor with which those ideas can be connected to the game. That is, while I sense deeper meaning, metaphors, emotions, and the like when I play or think about go, I have a lot of trouble actually putting these ideas into a more precise form. Part of the problem is that I'm not a philosopher (though I am a thinker). I have no idea how to even start such a game. So, I propose to try it but I don't have any idea how to do it or how it will work out. This is a copy of the living page "Naustin" at Sensei's Library. ![]() |