The Great Coincidence

You’d think anyone would prefer Heaven over Hell, given the choice. There is a good reason why not, though: Heaven is hard. As in, unyielding, solid, not malleable or bendable like the lower worlds. Some years ago I tried to explain this to some friends, and the were like “Have you read The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis?”

I have finally, this late in my life, started reading C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce. I rather enjoy it. It is a “spiritual fantasy” really, not an allegory but not intended as a realistic description of the spirit world, from his own preface. But he is not really hiding the religious content, not after the first few pages.

To me, the book is kind of shocking or unnerving. Not because of its religious implications, but because it is familiar in a completely different way. I wrote quite a bit of it before I knew it existed. And it wasn’t even religious. Not in the least. It was pure science fiction.

I was about 19 years old, I think, when these stories began to tell themselves in my head. They varied somewhat, but they had a common framework. There was this ordinary world, and there was a higher world, “the world above ours”. In my stories, it was a physical world, not a spiritual Heaven where souls went. One ascended to it in a secret cave, using a mysterious ladder that had been placed there in some unimaginable past. The main character who discovered this passageway was in for a rude surprise: The “world above ours” was 20 times more real than ours. Mass was that much denser, energy that more energetic. Even lack of energy, such as cold or dark, were more intense. The only time visiting this world was bearable was just after sunset and sunrise, when it was not cold enough to freeze you to ice and not hot enough to roast you alive. Even breathing the air there was painful, and at first you could not drink the water or even venture out of the cave. It would take repeated visits to gradually begin to absorb some of that more intense reality by breathing it in, before you could carefully begin to explore.

Conversely, after a while the muses in my head added a “world below ours” which was that much less real, so that anyone entering there from our world would be amazingly real at first, but gradually dissipate their reality the longer they stayed there and the more they used it.

Now I pick up this book from 1945 and there is this super-real world where even walking on the grass hurts the poor shades from the lower world, where they find themselves half transparent in the light there. I think the first thing that really creeped me out was the mention of the time of day: The very beginning of the dawn. The same time my own characters were able to visit “the world above ours”. The next was the promise that staying there would help them become able to tolerate the world, that the very nature there would assist them.

Conversely, in the world below, people were able to manifest houses simply by willing them into being, but the houses were insubstantial – in other words, the people had supernatural powers by virtue of being more real than the world, but the world itself was less real. It was an eerie echo of my own fiction from years before I heard any rumors of this book. I think the notion that this vertical stacking of worlds had any spiritual meaning only entered my mind 6-5 years ago, after I had started reading the One Cosmos blog.

My stories were, as I said, not at all religious. But the similarity is still more than enough that any literary agent would have pointed out that this was basically a secular take on Lewis’ book, I am sure. Except I had not even heard of it. (I had read Malacandra – Out of the Silent Planet – somewhere around that time, I think. But that was it. I was in my mid to late twenties when I found my second Lewis book, about Perelandra (Venus) and became aware that he had been a fairly active writer for a while.

Now, some may explain this by saying that when enough people have read a book, a morphic field is created which makes it easier to think the same thoughts. (“The 100th monkey effect”.) Or you may say that the spirit of Lewis inspired me from Heaven, because I was in my own way fairly innocent and had a similar temperament to him in his better years. But most would surely say that it is a coincidence. One of the innumerable coincidences that abound in my life. Sometimes I feel that being a Viewpoint Character is a bit like being ta’veren (in the Wheel of Time universe): Strange things happen around you frequently, but you cannot control them or even predict them. Even, it seems, when I am the one doing them!

But it sure is a huge coincidence, don’t you think?

City of Heroes closing down

Well, at least it seems America will outlive its (original and best) superhero game.

I logged on to Virtue, my favorite server on City of Heroes, for a little superheroing. It has been a couple weeks since last time, I guess. There were a bunch of people outside the City Hall in Atlas, where I usually log out. They seemed to be protesting something?

They were, it turned out, protesting the closure of the game, which is due for November. I had not heard anything about that. That was certainly unexpected: There were recently released a couple new power sets, and the number of users has been fairly stable for a while now. But evidently NCSoft is restructuring to focus on their [buzzword], which presumably means Korea, so Paragon Studies in America got the ax. I can see a certain logic in that. America is in decline. In a few years, it will join the Soviet Union and the British Empire as fond memories of a glorious past, I expect. Owning such an arch-typical American game will be a liability for an Oriental corporation in the new Asian dawn.

Still, it would be kind of nice if they could sell it instead. It is probably a bit late for that now, though. Customers will start drifting away. Well, after they finish today’s great rally on Virtue. There were 33 instances of Atlas Park when I left, filled with protesters holding signs or torches. Thousands of people making one last try to change the mind of people half way around the world. Good luck with that.

Perhaps I should log on some of my favorite characters and take some final screenshots before it is over? The game had great graphics and was one of my favorites for screenshots from before it even opened. Yes, I played from the closed beta onward. But it so happens that I have begun to play it less and less over the last two years or so. Not because of the game, which has grown steadily better. It is truly awesome by now. But I spend less time gaming now, I guess. Well, except for Go, currently, but I will probably give up that pretty soon. Anyway, that part of my life was slowly fading away already. So it is kind of convenient for me that this is when it ends. Still, it is a shame. It was a great idea and well executed. There is nothing quite like it. I doubt I am going to play any MMORPGs again after this one. Certainly not any from NCSoft.

The Go Teaching Ladder

“People only learn from mistakes when they are hurt by them” says Fujivara no Sai. I disagree. At the Go Teaching Ladder, you can learn from other people’s mistakes. In contrast, I don’t seem to learn from my own, even when they hurt – at least in Go.

A place where Go players can learn and teach at their leisure.

During my current Go (igo) fad, I have made my way to the Go Teaching Ladder. It is a website and database based on a simple but great idea: People can get their matches reviewed by someone who is more skillful than themselves, while also reviewing the matches of those ranked lower than themselves. For instance, if you are a 10-kyu player, you could review the game of a 20-kyu gamer and have your own latest match reviewed by a 1-kyu player.  (Actually the difference from 10 to 1 is greater than from 20 to 10, I would say. Progress is easier at the bottom. Well, once you get started, I guess. I still can’t seem to get it.)

By using this system, only the ones at the bottom are only receiving, and only those at the very top are only giving. And even that is not exactly true. You see, not only is it a well known fact that teaching makes your own understanding more solid. In the case of Go, there is also the element that Go is not a single skill. Some players are strong in the mid-game, others in the endgame. Some play logically, calculating possible future moves; others are intuitive, reacting to the shapes and patterns formed by the stones on the board. Some play more aggressively, others more defensively. Some rely on remembering a vast library of standard responses, while others prefer to think for themselves with every move they make. Because of this and more, you can be better than a player at nine moves in a row, and then the tenth amazes you with its brilliance. So reviewing someone moderately below you can still give you a bunch of new ideas.

Best of all, the reviewed games are stored in an archive for anyone to download and watch. It uses the .SGF format, which can be used by a number of programs to play back the moves on a visual Go board on the screen, with comments on the side and pointers on the board and alternative play sequences shown. The standard program from Pandanet, GoPanda, can also load these files. (The same format is used when you want to look back over your old games that you have played on the IGS.) GoPanda is written in Java so it probably runs on several non-Windows computers as well.

I have downloaded a few games, mainly such where a low-level match was reviewed by a high-level player. I was hoping that some of the mistakes were similar to mine and some of the advice was relevant to me. Wouldn’t that be nice. So I read a couple reviews, got a number of great ideas, and fired up a new game on my Galaxy Tab, still on the easiest level. It crushed me just as easily as before. Not only am I unable to learn from my mistakes, it seems I am unable to learn from other people’s mistakes as well, even when they are thoroughly documented and an alternative approach is spelled out. I must have lost close to a dozen games by now!

A dozen games? What happened to the 20 000 games I was suppose to lose, getting butthurt every time? Well, that was to become a master player. I am just saying, it should be possible to see or feel some progress after spending hours each day for several days studying Go. Perhaps I have an anti-talent, perhaps I am immune to Go somehow. I saw this guy at the Internet Go Server just recently, who had won 2100 games and lost 2400. He was 17-kyu (the lowest that is recognized on IGS) and struggling against someone in the beginner class (everything below 17k, basically). So after playing over 4500 games, he was still clinging to the bottom like a sea star. That is kind of sad. I wonder if that was someone who started playing Go in his later years as well? Or someone with an anti-talent, like me?

But for everyone else, the Go Teaching Ladder seems like a great resource.

Butt, meet ice

“Since I was small I have played hours of Go everyday, no matter how painful, I played Go.” Why would anyone play painful games? Why do people get butthurt several times a day, year out and year in?

Geoff Colvin, in his book Talent is Overrated, has calculated that before you become an Olympic figure-skater, you will have fallen on your butt on the cold hard ice at least 20 000 times, probably much more. No matter how talented you are, there are things the human body can only gradually be shaped into doing, through relentless effort day after day, month after month, for years. I hope those skaters have some kind of pillow on their butt the first 10 000 times at least, because there sure isn’t much protection when they actually perform.

No, I have not suddenly taken an interest in figure skating. I have suddenly taken an interest in the ancient board game of Go, and could not help but compare my situation. I have been reading several tutorials, watched numerous live games at different levels, read up on strategies and solved problems. And when I play against my Galaxy Tab at the easiest level, it cuts me to pieces. I once managed to secure about a third of the board by defending tightly, but it took the rest. If I try for more, it slices me to pieces. That hurts.

I used to always be the smartest guy in my class. Once I moved away from my second cousins, I used to be the smartest student in my class. From high school onward, I used to at least sometimes be the smartest person in my class, teacher included. I was somewhere between the smartest of a hundred and the smartest of a thousand, back in the days. I have not got Alzheimer’s yet, and not slipped on a banana peel and hit my head. The younger generation has crept up on me, that is true; they are smarter than mine was. But I am still not stupid, I like to think. And then this happens. Over and over again. I just can’t learn Go, it seems. Even if I read it from different angles and think I understand it, the moment white invades my territory, I have no idea what to do next. Or if I have, it does not work. My butt meets the cold, hard ice of reality and it hurts.

As I implied in my recent entry about GURPS and real life, I am used to following this principle: “If at first you don’t succeed, try something else; there are lots of things you’ll succeed at right away.” That’s how I’ve lived my life, for the most part. I am used to picking up things easily. It worked before. But this time, I try again – and I still don’t get it. I hope this is not how my life is going to be from now on out. I feel like an ordinary human. It is not a good feeling. Ordinary humans have my sympathy. An abstract and remote sympathy, for the most part. Until now, at least.

Now I wonder: If I try, try, try again – if I do my best and still lose 20 000 times – will I really become a master? Or is talent underrated, and you either got it or not? Am I simply too old? One thing is pretty sure: By the time I have lost 20 000 times, the processing power of the average Android tablet will have risen tenfold. So there is a pretty good chance I’ll still be limping off the scene rubbing my hurting butt, ten years from now.

Or I could do something more meaningful, I guess. If at first you don’t succeed, ask yourself whether it is really worth it…

Go (igo) and religion

“Even now I am in front of a Go board” thinks the 1000 year old ghost Sai from Hikaru no Go. “But for how long will God continue to listen to my selfishness?” The answer to that is a major spoiler for the story, but here’s a hint: Perhaps humans, like the stones on the Go board, are placed where they are for a purpose beyond themselves.

The ancient board game of Go may have some things in common with the great world religions. Is it a coincidence?

I hope that the recent revival of the ancient board game of Go (or igo, in Japanese) will also lead to a flowering of religion, specifically good religion. I generally think highly of religion, as promoting virtue and wisdom. But there is also bad religion, this cannot be denied: It promotes anger, pride and discord. I like to think that the game of Go, despite being a war game in principle, has qualities that encourage virtue and wisdom, and aligns with higher religion. I may be wrong about this, so let us think about it together.

It is clear from observation that Go encourages patience and self-control. We tend to think of young people as being volatile, given to quick bursts in one direction or the other, flittering and fluttering like butterflies from one idea to the next. But young people who play Go are able to sustain concentration for steadily longer periods of time, and suppress rash moves in order to reach a goal that is ahead in time. This is wise and virtuous, and any activity that promotes it should be given due credit.

An interesting difference between Go and chess is that chess is feudal: The pawns are inherently less worth than knights and bishops, from the very start. In contrast, all stones in Go are equal at the start, and equal at the end when they go back in the same box. It is only through their position on the board and the influence of being at the right time and place, that they derive their value. This is a way of looking at humans that is also aligned with virtue and wisdom. We are all born as babies, and it is through being at the right place at the right time doing the right thing that we become valuable in the greater picture. Someone who may seem insignificant at the moment may become very important at a future time.

To take one example, the religion of Christianity started in a barn and continued with a dead man on a stake, basically. It could hardly be less auspicious, a sight that would make most stomachs churn. But within a few decades, it was bringing light and hope to many nations. As for the Buddha, he was born a king but became a pawn, wandering off into the forest to leave all earthly ambitions behind. Yet his wisdom has lifted nations up over the ages to come. Lao-Tzu is said to have been riding out of the empire on a yak when he wrote the book of the Tao. He seemed destined to be forgotten, but a border guard convinced him to write briefly the wisdom of his long life. Even though what we do may seem insignificant, if it is part of a higher plan, it may turn things around long after our passing.There is no telling which small and forgettable person may end up being a hub on which fate turns. Nor can we tell at a glance who is winning and who is losing. The play of a greater hand may change one into the other.

A perhaps more double-edged effect of Go: Everything on the board must be assumed to be meaningful, to have a purpose, if only you could see it. Unless you are playing against a small child or a madman, there is not a stone on the board that isn’t there for a purpose.

The world we see around us can be said to consist of “law and coincidence”, or order and randomness. There are clearly laws of nature that keep the great things on path: The sun rises and sets, the moon waxes and wanes reliably. But there are also things that seem utterly unpredictable. This mixing of order and randomness goes very deep: If we have a sample of radioactive Actinium-225, we know that it will be reduced to half by exactly 10 days. But if we observe the individual atoms, there is no possibility to predict when they will decay. We know that half of them will be gone, but any one of them might linger for months, or disappear within seconds. There is no way they can agree among themselves who will change: They are atoms, they cannot communicate and have neither wit nor will.

On the goban (Go board), there is no randomness. Yet if you come by two strangers playing, at first glance it may look random indeed. (Although I am told that this is less so to an expert.) So the practice of playing Go encourages the thinking that all things have a meaning, a purpose. Religion is known to confer a similar experience. But is this really true?

There is such a thing as superstition. For instance, a black cat crosses the road and later that day you become virulently ill. There is a saying that bad fortune follows when a black cat crosses the road, so you may think this is the reason, or if not the reason then at least a portent or warning of something that would happen anyway. But neither science nor high religion supports this form of thinking. A lot of things happen that have no meaning in themselves.

But like the stones on the Go board, these things may have a meaning from outside themselves, because they are placed there by a higher hand. This is what religion teaches. But this requires belief in a God or Karma or some such higher power that controls all that seems to be random. That is quite a leap of faith! This aspect of religion is, and should be, voluntary. I am not going to try to convince you. As Jesus Christ once said: “If they don’t believe Moses and the prophets, they will not believe if someone rises from the dead.” Indeed, one of the last things any of his disciples said to him before his suffering in Gethsemane and on Calvary was: “Show us the Father, and it will be enough for us.” But of course Jesus could not show them the eternal, omnipresent God. He could only show himself. In the end, that was enough for 11 of the 12 who were with him. But not for all. No matter what we say or do, it will never be enough for all. This is how the universe was intended to work, allowing free will. This is what I believe.

So what I say is that the habits from playing Go may make it easier to think in the same way as higher religions do. Whether you think that is a good thing or not, I have no control over that. Nor do I see it as favoring one religion over another, really, although I suppose someone else may see that. And if you can derive wisdom and virtue from it without religion – which I am sure is possible as well – this is in itself a good thing, surely. These are scarce resources at any time.

But at least I can see more clearly now why so many elderly Japanese spend their final years playing Go. Perhaps it would be even better if they had started early, as many young people have done since the 1990es. Let us see what will be the final outcome of that.

Fun with Pandanet

“I could disguise myself and play…” Hikaru thinking of some way to play without anyone knowing his real name and age (he was just starting 7th grade so people would be excited if they saw him winning at Go all the time). Luckily he discovered the Internet, where nobody can see that you are a dog. Or a boy who gets advice from a 1000 year old ghost.

Since I am not doing anything impressive anyway, I may as well tell you the truth. I have been spending some time lately on Pandanet and the associated IGS – Internet Go Server.

The Internet Go Server is a surprisingly entertaining place, but I am not good at explaining it.

The place is still very much like it was in the anime Hikaru no Go, “a wild and woolly place where pros amuse themselves under assumed names, top Asian matches are mirrored in real time, and there’s always something exciting going on”, as the American Go Association puts it. Actually it is not entirely lawless: You have to register under a name and verify it by email to be allowed to play, although guests can (and do) watch. I registered my nick (Itlandm) after one of my earlier re-watches of Hikaru no Go, possibly even the first time.

The web site has news related to the server and official events being played there. It also has answers to frequently asked questions, and a section that teaches the basics of Go / igo from scratch. It is detailed, friendly and quite likely the best introduction to Go that I have seen. It teaches an intuitive approach: “Don’t you get the feeling that black controls a larger territory now?”  The concept of territory is central to this particular approach, taking the game back to its roots as the ultimate strategy game as a birds-eye view of a battlefield. The website aims to teach you enough Go (or igo, as it is commonly called in Japan) to start playing after ten “days” of lessons. There are only 5 rules in Go, so you’d think you could just jump right in, but you will feel a lot more confident once you learn basics like how to count territory and how to make shapes that cannot be destroyed. By the end of the course, you should be able to play the IGS robots, and then other players.

***

The ladder of kyu and dan: The heart of Pandanet – IGS is the server where you can play ranked games against others from all over the world. I am not sure how the ranking was established originally, probably with the help of experts. In real life, professional Go players need to play matches against those on the next level above them in order to gain a rank. The professional levels are called “dan”, and the amateur levels are called “kyu”. In practice, many amateurs these days are strong enough to play at the lower dan levels, but once you get to 5-dan and above, there are only a few players on IGS and people tend to follow their matches closely. I saw a 9-dan player once, but he was just watching. In real life, a 9-dan professional could make a pretty good living from his skills.

On the Internet Go Servers the ranking is done differently these days. (I base this on the website, since I am not playing yet, just watching.) By default all matches in the main hall are ranked, even if you play 3 levels above or below your level. Games are considered equal if you play with the proper handicap (a combination of extra territory points and extra starting stones for the weaker player). If you win an even game, you gain 100 points. If you lose, you lose 100 points. But if you play a stronger or weaker player without handicap, the points vary based on the level difference. If you play against a stronger player, you get more points for a win but lose less points for a loss. The other way around if you play against a weaker player.

It is the sum of these points that decide what rank you are, or in other words your strength at Go. The line for increasing one level or half-level is higher than for decreasing, so you won’t keep changing levels up and down several times a day merely by winning and losing every other time. You need to consistently play better to gain a higher level.

The rank numbers are a bit strange in Go. The highest kyu level is 1, and there is no limit to how bad you can be (although as mentioned, the IGS stops at 17 now). But with dan (the system used by professionals) you start at 1 and in practice stops at 9. On the IGS, 10 dan is the maximum, but I have only seen that one 9-dan player so far. (Even though the names are the same, the actual professional dan levels are separate from the rating used on the Net and amateur tournaments. They should be vaguely comparable, over time. In practice, pro levels are noticeably higher, since it takes far longer to rise in the formal hierarchy of professional play. Even if you were a 7 dan amateur, you have to start as a 1 dan pro.)

If you know your strength from elsewhere, you can start with a provisory level. That way you won’t have to play hundreds of games to reach your correct level, and it is also more fair to those who play you. Otherwise a lot of people will lose points playing against what seems to be an equal player, but who is actually much stronger. Of course, if you are bluffing, it will become obvious pretty soon. But I just saw a provisory 6-dan, and he has a healthy ratio of wins, so that saved a lot of irritation for other people. Conversely, I saw another player who had several hundred more wins than losses. Either he has improved greatly from he started, or left a trailed of devastated opponents.)

Of course, if I ever get good enough to play against humans at all, I will have to start at the Beginner Class, which is below even 17 kyu.  Games here are not rated. But before even that there is a room where you can play against robots. I wonder if I will ever get beyond that. My Galaxy Tab beats me handily at its easiest level, so it does not look good for my future as a Go player! Perhaps that is a good thing, all things considered…