Go figure

I was amused by this box image from the Michael Stanfield (MS) Go set. The makers haven't gone for the obvious Japanese-themed illustration, and have instead tried to portray a kind of 1960s middle-class sophistication. Full marks for the depiction of the man using the correct traditional stone placement method (between index and middle finger). But the game itself is a bit of a mystery: there are a lot of peculiar stone placings that don't further the game's aim, to surround territory, usually starting with the corners and then the edges.

It is, however, vastly better as a portrayal of a Go game than the completely random board position in Kunyoshi's 1843 Raiko Tormented by the Ground Spider. Considering the general attention to detail, you'd think Kuniyoshi would have known better.

image from The Many Faces of Go software package

A real Go game tends to look like this at the end of the opening phase:

This is the Wikipedia image of Game 1 of the 2002 Korean LG Cup final between Choe Myeong-hun and Lee Sedol.

- Ray

Bayan time (15): Angry Birds

Last Sunday I went to the Topsham Folk Club (at its current temporary venue in Route 2 Cafe Bar while The Globe is being renovated). I'm not terribly into folk - at least in its English folk club incarnation - but at the moment I'm getting in as much public performance practice as I can, as I'm due to play on Topsham Quay on June 2nd. There was a full turnout, so I only played one slot, but I took along a couple of Finnish tunes: a very slimmed-down instrumental version of Koskaan et muuttua saa (a.k.a. Adagio Cardinal), and the decidedly non-folk Angry Birds theme by Ari Pulkkinen. They went down very well, and the second one definitely raised a chuckle in the back row.

On the off-chance that you don't know it, the Angry Birds theme backs the Rovio Mobile strategy puzzle game originally developed as an app for Apple iOS devices such as the iPhone:

Ari Pulkkinen’s most famous composition so far, Angry Birds theme reflects the silliness and different phases of anger of the Angry Birds – the first phase is the peaceful phase of the birds when they are happy and have all of their eggs (it’s also famous for its ability to stuck to everyones mind), second phase is when the Birds realise that their eggs have been stolen and the last phase is when the Birds are chasing the pigs for the crimes against birdmanity.
- aripulkkinen.com

I think one can overanalyse! It's a vigorous and witty tune - here's the original - that has inspired a number of arrangements such as Lara's piano version, this klezmer-style Genevieve Trio version for soprano sax and piano accordion, the comic duet by the excellent Pomplamoose, this London Philharmonic Orchestra one ... and, naturally, standalone piano accordion. It's also perfect for bayan.

- Ray

Tangrams: Hanzi Smatter?

Language Log just covered a 1700s-1800s example of "Hanzi Smatter", a generic term for use of faux-Chinese script in Western culture (the term derives from the weblog of that name).

That reminded of a probable example from my copy of Henry Ernest Dudeney's 1917 Amusements in Mathematics, which happens to be online both on Project Gutenberg and Google Books.



Discussing a correspondent's copy of an old Tangram book, Dudeney writes:

I reproduce the Chinese inscription [above, figure labelled 8] for this reason. The owner of the book informs me that he has submitted it to a number of Chinamen in the United States and offered as much as a dollar for a translation. But they all steadfastly refused to read the words, offering the lame excuse that the inscription is Japanese. Natives of Japan, however, insist that it is Chinese. Is there something occult and esoteric about Tangrams, that it is so difficult to lift the veil? Perhaps this page will come under the eye of some reader acquainted with the Chinese language, who will supply the required translation, which may, or may not, throw a little light on this curious question.

Addendum: I should have Googled more assiduously; Donald C Read's 1965 Tangrams: 330 Puzzles has an explanation. Read actually had a copy of the book in question, and found that the mysterious logo isn't on the cover, but on the second-to-last page.



Apparently it's just the caption to the illustration, saying roughly "Two men facing each other drinking. This shows the versatility of the seven-piece puzzle".

The Dudeney version appears to have undergone considerable degradation in copying; perhaps this explains the failure of Dudeney's contacts to read it.

- Ray

More from Hell

In December 2007 - see Dante's World - I mentioned enjoying Niven and Pournelle's Inferno, a modern retelling of the Hell section of Dante's Divine Comedy. I just finished (considerably faster than I did The Lair of the White Worm) reading the 2009 sequel, Escape from Hell (Tor Books, February 2009, ISBN-10: 0765316323).

A bit of necessary preamble: in Inferno, the science fiction writer Carpenter falls from a window during a drinking stunt and wakes up in what resembles the Vestibule of Hell as depicted by Dante. Initially sceptical, he dubs the place Infernoland, and struggles to rationalise it in SF terms. But finally, convinced by physical impossibilities such as regeneration from mortal injuries, he accepts its reality as Dante's Hell. Although puzzled by some aspects (for instance, how he mostly meets Americans, just as Dante mostly met Italians) he concludes that Hell is a kind of theological last chance. Hell is escapable, but only for those with the resolve to journey to its centre. He undertakes this quest, guided by a reformed Benito Mussolini in a Virgil-like role, and accompanied by Jerome Corbett, a pilot who died in a Space Shuttle accident, and William Bonney (i.e. Billy the Kid). Hell's geography is more or less as described by Dante, but with elaborations due to new forms of sin, such as industrial pollution, overtaking archaic ones such as simony.

Escape from Hell initally finds Carpenter despondent in the Wood of Suicides, telling his story to the tree that is Sylvia Plath. Near the centre of Hell, he had been seized by a bearded man who exploded, and found himself reconstituted back in the Vestibule, where undecided souls chase banners for eternity. Adopting Mussolini's role as a guide, he persuaded a lawyer, Rosemary Bennett, to follow him in retracing the journey to escape, but now he has lost her.

Carpenter finds Hell considerably more complex than he had understood at the end of Inferno. He is not alone among damned souls allowed to wander free in Hell - a role gained, it seems, by virtuous acts and altruism such as freeing trapped souls - and Hell itself is changing. Because Hell must mirror Catholic doctrine, Vatican II has changed the status of many past sinners, and Hell's bureaucracy is struggling to keep up. Hence another way of gaining leniency, and even power, is to be recruited to Hell's infrastructure (whether as simple guards, or in helping to computerise records in Dis, Hell's adminsitrative centre).

Norman Spinrad described Inferno as "the ultimate Sam Peckinpah movie with all the matter-of-fact solidity of a Hal Clement novel ... lunacy of a transcendent order". Escape from Hell came across as less striking and slower-paced, now that I know the scenario, but it makes up in general character-building and historical interest. Niven and Pournelle focus, for instance, on the Hughes-Plath relationship, the motivation of Robert Oppenheimer, and indictment of various forms of US political corruption relating to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. The focus on US contemporary persons makes for a slight impediment to reading - I needed to keep a bookmark at the glossary of names - but it was overall a very enjoyable sequel.

On the subject of Dante, reviews are coming out for the Dante's Inferno videogame. There seems general agreement that it's spectacular. But as The Independent said - see Hit & Run: Abandon all hope, it's Dante's Inferno: the game - Dante was an intellectual type not really fitted to the genre:

Dante has been beefed up into a blood-hungry crusader, and the date has been rewound by 100 years. The problem for the developers is that Dante paints himself as a man constantly on the verge of passing out in fear of what confronts him. He doesn't, at least in the version I studied, kick open the gates of Hell and invite the evil dead to bring it on. Yet the poet painted a vast and terrifying landscape in the Divine Comedy, with miserable souls facing punishments that still sear the imagination. And the developers have realised this terrain with great relish – it's hard not to be swept up by the sheer scale and gory glory of the game.

I'm not terribly into that style of game (I wouldn't know an Xbox 360 if it bit me) but its polish and detail - many Dante characters are featured - is certainly an indication of the enduring power of Dante's vision. See the official site. Perhaps, as Inferno did, it'll spark a further renewal of interest in the original.

See also: 1935 ante's Inferno.

- Ray

Breaking out of the game

A recommendation: Ian Watson's Queenmagic, Kingmagic (Grafton, 1988, ISBN-10: 0586074147), which Felix just lent me (I re-used the Flammarion woodcut as this is another conceptual breakthrough novel).

An expanded version of Watson's novella Queenmagic, Pawnmagic, it tells the story of Pedino, a "pawn-squire" in a world modelled on chess. Two kingdoms, Bellogard and Chorny, are locked in a centuries-long battle fought by assassination and counter-assassination among the few important individuals (kings, queens, knights, and so on) who have powers of magical teleportation and attack. The story initially follows Pedino's schooling in Bellogard, his elevation to a role in the battle, and his liaison with Sara, a young prostitute who is a spy for Chorny, but it then takes a more cosmic turn. Both sides know that the end of the war is the end of their world, and both have vague awareness of previous cycles of existence; this is leading a few mystics and academics to look for ways to break out of that cycle.

Eventually Pedino finds a way to jump with Sara into other realities based on other games: one world where snakes and ladders provide portals to enclaves of higher and lower standards of living; another based on Monopoly, where society is based on a lethal property ladder run by lottery; and a third, in which soldiers and civilians are muddling through during confused movements of military encampments, based on the scoring stage of Go. Finally he finds himself in a new cycle of existence of the Bellogard-Chorny war, his options cramped by elevation to ineffectual kingship, but with sufficient acquired knowledge to guide more focused efforts to break through the "bubbles" into other planes of existence.

I enjoyed Queenmagic, Kingmagic a lot, with some reservations; it does go on fast-forward toward the end, and some parts I suspect wouldn't be widely understood. Recognising the Russian in-jokes in proper names is a bonus - for instance, Bishop Slon = Bishop Elephant, referring to the piece's form prior to Westernisation. That's not crucial (though I'd like to know what exactly Watson meant by the repeated incantation "Opasnost po Zhivot!" which transliterates as "Опасность по живот" - "Peril to stomach". Maybe flank attack?). However, while most readers know chess at least theoretically, fewer will know Go, much less recognise the troop movements in that section of the book as a description of the rearrangement of stones during the scoring phase). But overall it's great fun, and manages to stay fresh and witty despite the fairly dark scenario of characters fighting the dissolution of their universe.

Queenmagic, Kingmagic obviously isn't the first fiction to be set inside a chess game; the best-known prototype is Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (Gutenberg EText-No. 12). 1 whose story is integrated with a real chess problem (see Gardner's classic concordance The Annotated Alice) though one that contains illegal moves. There's a detailed analysis in Glen Robert Downey's PhD dissertation The Truth about Pawn Promotion: the Development of the Chess Motif in Victorian Fiction which is very worth reading for its exploration of the long history, pre-Carroll, of allegorical chess motifs in Western fiction. In mediaeval times, a succession of authors wrote "chess moralities" that mapped the roles of pieces map on to the real-world hierarchy to morally instructive intent: for instance, John of Wales' Quaedam moralitas de scaccario per Innocentium papum (The Innocent Morality) and Jacobus de Cessolis' Liber de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium (see Power play: the literature and politics of chess in the Late Middle Ages, Jenny Adams, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006, ISBN 081223944X). The drift of such works was generally to reinforce conventional moralities, often via edifying pseudo-origins to the game, but later, Middleton's play A Game at Chess took a more subversive stance and used the chess format for political satire.

Post-Carroll, chess continued to be a popular theme for fiction, particularly science fiction; Poul Anderson's The Immortal Game (F&SF, 1954) is also worth finding for its vivid insider view of a chess game:

The first trumpet sounded far and clear and brazen cold, and Rogard the Bishop stirred to wakefulness with it. Lifting his eyes, he looked through the suddenly rustling, murmuring line of soldiers, out across the broad plain of Cinnabar and the frontier, and over to the realm of LEUKAS. Away there, across the somehow unreal red-and-black distances of the steppe, he saw sunlight flash on armor and caught the remote wild flutter of lifted banners. So it is war, he thought. So we must fight again.

Again? He pulled his mind from the frightening dimness of that word. Had they ever fought before?

(The title and plot refer to the classic "Immortal Game" played between Anderssen and Kieseritzky in 1851, famous for Anderssen's win by audacious sacrifice of major pieces. The final moves of the same game are quoted in the game between Sebastian and Tyrell in Blade Runner).

The Greenwood encyclopedia of science fiction and fantasy: themes, works, and wonders has more examples of this theme.

Ongoing: I recommend A haphazard way to move through life and treasure... at The Growlery, which has further recommendations (that I second) for the works of Ian Watson. Felix mentions that he "personally liked the Go section, finding it the most evocative of the whole book", and I can see why: it is the most realistic depiction of the human condition, akin to the age-old situation of refugees, airdropped supplies haphazardly, being shuffled around between temporary encampments in furtherance of a war whose tactics are indiscernable. I just didn't think it a wise choice of game given - at the time - its relative obscurity (outside cognoscenti) to a Western readership. Now, Internet accessibility, through IGS Pandanet for instance, has greatly increased its player base.

Go itself does have a considerable role in literature and art. Although the absence of identifiable special pieces doesn't lend it to personification in the style of chess, it has attracted a large body of philosophy in relation to war, business, and life in general (the two stone colours map readily on to the yin and yang of Taoism). I'll leave that aside mostly - except to recommend Japanese Prints and the World of Go, by William Pinckard, for its nice overview of its omnipresence in Edo period depictions of legend and everyday life - and move to the narrower field of its manifestation in Western fiction. Go in Western literature, by Brian ‘Chiwito’ McDonald, is a slightly out-of-date but still pertinent commentary on the relatively few Western works to feature Go in a major role. Iain Banks is mentioned (I'd forgotten that his Walking on Glass contained a number of variants on board games) along with Ian Watson, as well as a number of other familiar faces: some members of the aforementioned Oulipo were into Go. McDonald also debunks the common belief that Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game is about - or even inspired by - Go, explaining how Hesse's game isn't physical, and even in its historical form within the book's mythos, used a wire-and-bead system unlike Go.

Oh, I've just recalled too that Katin in Nova knows about Go, but then he would.

And lights dimmed.

The captain hooked in. The grafitti, the scars on the walls, vanished. There were only the red lights chasing one another on the ceiling.

"A shook up go game," Katin said, "with iridescent stones."

Addendum, Friday 28th August The Guardian Books Blog has a piece by Stuart Evers, Why chess is a perfect game for fiction, which recommends the anthology of chess stories, The 64-Square Looking Glass: Great Games of Chess in World Literature (Burt Hochberg, Times Books, 1993, ISBN-10: 0812919297).
- Ray

1. Alice Through the Looking-Glass is a common misnomer.
2. Also worth looking at for Go and the 'Three Games', which explores the idea of three region-related philosophical subtexts to historically classic games: the Middle Eastern backgammon as Fate-dominated; chess playing out the "great myths of the West ... the overthrow of a hero and the crowning of a new hero ... a hierarchical and pyramidal society with powers strictly defined and limited", and the Eastern Go representing processes of pure mentation. Maybe - but this reeks of national stereotype, and ignores that chess - as shogi - is also highly traditional and highly popular in Japan, and that backgammon has been extremely popular in England and Europe: Chambers's Information for the People: A Popular Encyclopaedia, 1854, said of it:

the game has been long established in the country; and, as a fireside amusement of a decorous and exciting nature, is a favourite among clergymen, squires, farmers, and retired professional persons.