Shinkenjoe wrote:
Why Go and not Mah-Jongg?
The first reason is that this is a go forum, and not a Mah-Jongg forum, but the second reason is that the paper, while meant as a way for American military thinkers to better understand Chinese military thinking, it also can be seen by the go player as a description of the Chinese way of thinking about go.
One of the first things that struck me in the article, was that a comparison was made of American military thinking to various sports, in particular football, chess, poker and boxing (p. 2). Recently I was thinking about which sport most resembled go, and boxing was the one that came to my mind. (Well,perhaps boxing in slow motion). But, why boxing? I don't really know all that much about it, but it seems to me like a sport in which you try to hurt your opponent before he hurts you, and the strategy involves finding and exploiting the opponent's weaknesses. My suspicion after reading part of the paper is that this is a particularly western way of looking at go. I do know that good boxers don't just pound away at their opponents, but that is a big part of it, and I am pretty sure that my thinking about go is likewise rather primitive.
I do realize that I am screwing with the metaphor, but the paper does show that the Chinese way of thinking about conflicts is different than the traditional American approach. There is less emphasis on overpowering the opponent, and more on influencing the development and character of the conflict itself. It also seems at least plausible that go, which was developed in China, reflects this way of thinking in a similar way to how American Football might reflect an American view of conflicts. If this is so, then it would also be plausible that Chinese theories of strategy would be more applicable to go than American ones.
Side note: Funny how someone writes a serious paper for military strategists and doesn't notice how silly
looks. 