A Chinese cultural group in the UK today (7 September 2013) organised a lecture at the British Museum in which the main speaker was Wang Runan 8-dan, who has for some time been Numero Uno in Chinese go politics. The majority of the audience was Chinese but a few old-school Brits turned up as ballast, while a handful of the brightest young talents were allowed to play Wang in a 4-board simul. I didn't stay for that, and I have to admit to falling asleep in the first part of Wang's talk, where he recounted go "history" in a King-Alfred-burnt-the-cakes way. But he was actually a very good speaker and I was rewarded when I woke up.

The thing that caught my attention the most was when he said that a common fault with westerners was their insistence on being exact, their inflexibility and their unwillingness to accept grey areas. I happen to recognise what he's referring to, and I'm sure others do too, but what surprised me was that he said it here. After all, it's rather like being invited to someone's house and then telling the hostess her curtains don't match the upholstery. Presumably it was something he felt strongly about, and it's far from the first time I've heard such comments.

Wang appeared to mean it generally at first, but a little later he developed this theme within playing a game of go, and he argued that it was better to aim at finding three 9-out-of-10 moves rather than one 10-out-of-10. Of course if a 10/10 pops up that's fine, but usually the effort to find 10/10 fails and what is left (in the time available) is something like 5/10. Aiming for 3 x 9/10 gives you a decent chance of getting at least one 9/10. I've met this probabilistic thinking about go before in China, and in this case it's not just the west that is "wrong" - they criticise the Japanese for not using probabilities (but Japanese pros differ from us in that the always have the "soba" move in reserve, like a pro golfer always ensuring he gets at least par).

Another point of interest was his insistence on taking an overall view. Although I am about to embroider a little what he says, I think it is worth adding a few stitches to the tapestry because it's a major topic in books/articles aimed at amateurs in the Far East as well as here. The fact that the message has be repeated so often suggests a major disconnect between pro and ama thinking, and Wang certainly tried to labour this point, freely using body language as well as metaphors to get the point over. And the point is this: when told to consider the overall position, amateurs tend to lean back and then lean forward again to try to use new information to focus again. But I gathered he wished to convey a different approach: take a helicopter view and then try steadily to see how stones (usually the last ones played, of course) impact on the rest of the board. In other words, your gaze should be radiating outwards rather than re-focusing inwards. To pick up on his helicopter analogy, rather than thinking of going up as a policeman to shine a searchlight on a spot of bother, we should we thinking like an archaeologist who goes up to see traces of old settlements over a wide area.

One other point he made was that a pro may see 30 moves ahead but for an amateur 3 moves ahead is fine - it is the very act of looking ahead that makes the biggest difference, not how deep you read. If you only read one move ahead, i.e. you make knee-jerk responses to common shapes, you might as well forget go he said. Again, I've heard this advice from other pros, but it bears repeating.

He also claimed that all the top people in the CIA and at West Point know go (in an effort to understand China). Unless he has seen the results of the work of Chinese hackers, this claim should probably be put in the same category as his account of go history, but he did also say that all the top politicians in China are strong players. That is something he would be ideally placed to know.

He mentioned Obama's gift of a go board to China, and clearly that had made an impression at the time. But afterwards I asked him where the board is now, expecting to hear it was in a major museum or something, but he just said it was "in some government office somewhere".

The first part of your post reminds me of an interview from Go World Iss. 50 that I recently read:


Another related quote is from a game commentary on game 3 of the 13th Kisei title match in Go World Iss. 56:

Thanks for sharing, very enlightening!

I would take the claim that politicians are strong players with a massive dose of salt too. I remember seeing an arranged photo of (irc) the prime minister playing Go with another person and the board looked as if they were playing connect 5.