Go Luminosity and Darkness

cc by Alexander Edward Genaud
or Poetic License
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The humble little game above represents one of my life's great tragedies. I was between jobs one summer several years ago, moved into a new apartment, no television, no internet, no job. It was great! I was coding up a storm, several projects, including analysing several years worth of go game data.

Go is that thing above. It's an ancient Chinese board game. It's fascinating for several reasons. One that I like is that computers are really bad at it. OK, several pieces of software can consistently beat me. But what I mean is that computers can't beat smart people. You name it: Chess, poker, Jeopardy, and the game of love. Computers generally defeat the best humans. But not go. Look it up. Try to search for 'weiqi' the Chinese name cuz 'go' is not gonna be fruitful on Google.

Back to my tragedy. Fast forward some years. Some loved ones and I were up above the polar circle in Ilulissat one winter, celebrating Christmas. I suppose we hoped to get the first pickings from Santa's sled. During that time, the Greenlandic national airline went on strike, first the pilots, then the managers, then the pilots were locked out. We were stranded up near the northern hemisphere's largest iceberg factory. Couldn't go to work, the sun wasn't going to rise for weeks. No, that's not the tradgedy. It was fantastic. Dog sled rides, hikes, northern lights, incredible natural beauty, tranquility, solitude, silence. When I wasn't out climbing mountains and fighting the weather, I was inside coding.

I picked up the go code that I had put aside for over a year. I was attempting to compress the encoding of entire games and was replaying thousands almost millions of professional and highly skilled amatuer games searching for patterns. And I found some. Some startling results. Maybe this is old news in the world of Artifical Intelligence, but was quite shocking and strangely elegant to me. Game play was very similar to to equations for the luminocity of light or the strength of gravity between two masses proportional to each players skill level or advantage in the game. I could predict with some accuracy who would win very early in a game simply by certain statistical patterns of their game play. I wouldn't have a clue how these masters would win, just who would win. I produced rich colorful 3D graphs, refactored the code several times, produced lots of cool stuff during my forced sabatical in the Arctic during winter.

And I lost everything I worked on that winter.

I'll save you the details. I had more than a few old copies of code in git repositories back home. I'm sure it would not take me more than a solid week or two to get back. Or two months of evening coding. But it broke my heart. And I haven't come back to it again. Maybe some day.

With that, enjoy a simple game of go with a friend.


cc by Alexander Edward Genaud or Poetic License

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