Major new article on go in German

[John Fairbairn]

I had the great pleasure of meeting Mark Siemons in Berlin recently. Mark is now based in Berlin but was formerly a China correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and heard about my go books there. He asked to interview me, in order to promote go by writing about the game in the Sunday edition of the newspaper. Since there was about to be a ball to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Berlin Scottish Country Dancing Society, I decided to combine the two things and went to Berlin to do the interview there.

It has now appeared. It's in German, of course, under the title "Das Spiel der Wandlungen" (The Game of Transformations). The full reference is 25 May, 2025 | No. 21 | Page 33 | Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. There is an online subscription service but, if it is not online only, you may be able to find the actual paper either within Germany or at a shop in other countries that sells foreign newspapers.

As befits this august newspaper, the article is thoughtful, thought-provoking and wide-ranging, touching on religion, politics, philosophy and even current tariff economics (if that's not something of an oxymoron). A little highbrow even, but one way of describing the whole piece is that it sets out to justify the famous quote often attributed to world chess champion Emanuel Lasker, that if intelligent aliens exist on another planet, the game they would play would be go.

If Lasker's interest in go interests you, you can find much more in another German production but one written in English: Volume 2 of the scrupulously sourced biography "Emanuel Lasker" edited by Richard Forster et al. (Exzelsior Verlag, Berlin 2018), pages 165 ~ 213. I was an editorial consultant for this, but the very well-written text was by Theo van Ees and Christian Wohlfarth, and so you are in very safe hands.

[RobertJasiek]

if intelligent aliens exist on another planet, the game they would play would be go.

For a game to be reinvented remotely, several game design decisions have to be made. Go (with some reasonably simple ruleset) requires a comparatively small number of such design decisions. Simpler games, such as Tic-Tac-Toe, require even fewer so their reinvention is more likely. To invent Go, a sample design decision is the place where to put stones / assign colourings / denote marks: on facets, edges or vertices of a graph, possibly mixed. If aliens shared a particular objective of game invention with us, they might make the design decision of creating a game that is interesting due to its demanding complexity of play. Although this raises the likelihood of reinvention of go, there could be countless of complex games even among those with a comparatively small number of such design decisions.

For these reasons, Laskers statement is not particularly correct. Instead, we have to presume a context in which he might have been thinking. Given the mankind's non-trivial games known to Lasker, which of them would be the most likely to be reinvented by aliens? We know he knew Western Chess and go, but, of course, there are many others. Among these two games, it is more likely to reinvent go than Chess because go stones are designed simpler than Chess pieces: only one type instead of several (and even peculiar) types. (Each in one of two colours.)

[karaklis]

the famous quote often attributed to world chess champion Emanuel Lasker, that if intelligent aliens exist on another planet, the game they would play would be go.

As far as I know it wasn't Emanuel Lasker quoting this, but Edward Lasker, who is only distantly related to Emanuel.

[Javaness2]

I believe it to be worse than this. It was actually first stated by Wilhelm, the neighbour of Edmund , who happened to have a dog called Siegbert.

[jlt]

Is there a game that was invented independently by two different human civilizations? If so, then that game is probably played elsewhere in the universe.

[dfan]

the famous quote often attributed to world chess champion Emanuel Lasker, that if intelligent aliens exist on another planet, the game they would play would be go.

As far as I know it wasn't Emanuel Lasker quoting this, but Edward Lasker, who is only distantly related to Emanuel.

My copy of Chess Secrets I Learned from the Masters, where I think I read this story, is in storage, but my recollection is that Edward quotes Emanuel saying it.

I own the Lasker biography John mentioned and the chapter on Go is very thorough and interesting.

[tundra]

My copy of Chess Secrets I Learned from the Masters, where I think I read this story, is in storage, but my recollection is that Edward quotes Emanuel saying it.

The Internet Archive has a copy of the book, here:

https://archive.org/details/chesssecretsilea0000unse

...but I have searched in vain for this particular quote. If you know where it is in the book, please let us know. I have wondered about the source of this quote for ages.

[jts]

I doubt Edward Lasker said this (or reported it). His books are pretty brief, they're all in English as far as I know, there are multiple reports about him published in English from friends who knew him personally, and according to the AGA they've all been pored over and no one can find the quote.

If anything the quote has the flavor of philosophically romantic things that Emanuel Lasker said about chess in his earlier essay "The Game of the Future" and in his book "Struggle" (which I think preceded his return to Germany and learning Go). I looked in a couple of Emanuel's books and couldn't find an exact match, but Die Brettspiele des Völker says about Go: "It has a more consistent logic than chess, surpasses it in simplicity, and, I believe, does not lag behind it in the vigor of imagination." (German: „Es hat eine durchgehendere Logik als das Schach, ist ihm an Einfachheit überlegen und steht ihm, glaube ich, an Schwung der Phantasie nicht nach.“)

He goes on to add: "It has characteristics that make it difficult for us to comprehend. Both games, chess and Go, are images of war, but chess resembles a knightly battle, while Go resembles a modern struggle of the entire people. Our imagination and temperament lean more toward the dynamic back-and-forth of the knights’ combat; the logic of slow movements, which know no retreat and are based on the connection and separation of individual modulations, does not lie in our blood. However one may explain this situation, assimilating Go would be a great gain for most peoples." This obviously has nothing to do with "aliens", but clearly Emanuel Lasker believed Chess had aspects that were specific to the emotions of particular peoples and historical situations.

Possibly the famous quote emerged as a series of paraphrases of this passage, or maybe Emanuel Lasker repeats these general ideas in one of his philosophical works.