Life In 19x19

Two players were honoured in April 2022 in the annual Japnaese government's gong fest.

Iyama Yuta got the Medal of Honour with Purple Ribbon, which is the usual entry level for go and shogi players. I haven't checked, but he may well be the youngest ever go gong getter.

Ishida Yoshio became one of the very few to get more than one gong. His Medal of Honour came in 2016 and he can now add the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette. Only one player has been gonged thrice.

Ishida still has a fantastic career record. As of 25 April it was 1144 wins, 724 losses and 1 void game, giving a total of 1869 games. He is thinking about retiring when he reaches 2000 games.

He revealed the source of his nickname of Computer. It was given to him by Yamabe Toshiro in 1970 when they visited the Osaka Expo together, and saw a Fujitsu mainframe computer on the Japanese display. But it was also done to put him on a par with his fellow Kitani disciples who already had nicknames (Kato - the Assassin and Takemiya = Cosmonaut).

He was asked for his thoughts on AI, and said that he was a fan of old games. "Old go had a flow. It had beauty. AI has no creativity of its own, no personality. In art terms it has no merit." He did not expect the AI games of today be esteemed several hundred years from now in the way we esteem human games of centuries ago. And that's from one computer to another! Give him ANOTHER gong!

Good to see a government making awards like this. I completely agree with Ishida in his evaluation of AI games. Matches between AI machines are really matches between computer programmers, not go players. However, if I recall correctly, Ishida himself played an early opening 3-3 invasion decades ago. I think he thought of it as a probe to help deciding how to conduct the rest of the opening. We are familiar with the story of how the go master can tell from the moves in a game when a player had a crisis of confidence and when the tea was brought in. Would we see that in a game between Katago and the original Alphgo? Maybe something like computer Black suffered from a momentary brownout at move 123 could be said.

I see, so after winning all sevens the honour he received was a different one?