A Go Game

What sort of game do I want? I see the beginning of the Go game as a conversation, where I decide with my partner what sort of game I want to play.
Do we want to play a standoffish game of opaque strategy, do we want to have a singleminded scrap across the whole board. Do we want to play similar styles, or pit different styles against each other? Do we want to cooperate, or argue? Do we want to experiment with new ideas, refine developing skills, or exercise prior knowledge? What combination of these things do we want to do?

So, the opening is like a statement of policy. After that, the outward aim of the game is to see whose policy works the best. Go's excellent handicapping property (it's too basic and intrinsic to be called a rule) is such that the strength of the players should only be a factor in the choice of policy, not a decider of the outcome of the game. (Unless the strength gap is too great, in which case teaching games are more appropriate.)
Go helps you realise your own strength, not waste it, and not have a false impression of it. If you adopt policies that you don't have the strength to follow up, you lose. But if you adopt policies that you easily have the strength to follow up, if the handicap was set correctly, you will lose because you wasted your stones.

If your strategies turn out to be ineffective, you have to find the agility to move onto effective strategies. Go is full of balances like this.

Maybe I will play an inflexible strategy in the hope that it is one my opponent doesn't know and will lose to. Maybe I will try and play as flexibly as possible, partly to hide my lack of a plan, and partly to be ready for unexpected events. Good go is a combination of all these things. And the size of the goban means you can adopt a varying mix of these in different places on the board.

So by the midgame the strategies are decided, there is no more room to change them (barring swindles). It is up to both players to follow through with the promises they made at the beginning. If they don't, they lose.

If the handicap was right, and both players made good choices, the result may be a draw. The endgame is an opportunity to avoid a draw by making up points in the last little fights over small amounts of remaining territory.

So perhaps one view of Go is this. The opening is a gamble. Do you have the skill to pull off the strategy you want to use in order to win? Do you want to win on the strategy, or rely on using superior strength to take a big swing in the midgame, or do you want to make it a close game and take the win with little points in the endgame?
Because stones are played in turns, both players base their decisions on the intentions the other communicates through their stones.
Once the bets have been made, they have to be tested. As the game progresses there is less and less opportunity to change your bets, and you are forced to follow them through.
By the endgame, both players are scraping up the last points, either to emphasize or blunt a victory, or to snatch one.
Gamble, prove, scrape.

An ideal game of Go is a draw: both players chose appropriate strategies for their skills, the handicap was correct, and neither could break the others choices. Because the skill of individuals varies widely and according to context, and because the available strategies and tactics in Go are so great, this means that in reality the game may not always be a draw. A well balanced game that isn't a draw and where no mistakes were made represents both players exploring new territory. A well balanced, flawless game that is a draw represents both players practicing on charted territory.

A good Go player works a balance between practice and exploration. In a full-size game there is often opportunity to do both.

Go has very much depth!

Bearing all that in mind, playing Go against a computer is quite strange, especially when it's better than you! It's as if the computer is beating me at a Turing test.
Once you've gotten over the weirdness of taking a game against a computer seriously enough to play properly, the fact that it's actually better than you is quite interesting. (Remember that number crunching is not a big item in the armoury of a Go player). Perhaps this is the one way in which a computer can actually teach me (albeit only for the beginning stages), rather than merely being a portal through which I view information.

the manchurian candidate

I just finished watching The Manchurian Candidate. It's quite an interesting film. And it was quite interesting to watch it. I was watching it on a video-on-demand service, I could pause, rewind and fastforward the movie. Everything was streaming into my living room through co-ax. My TV is now connected to Media Player running on a dedicated box, attached to the internet. Basically.

It doesn't seem so long ago that these sorts of technologies were pipedreams.

Now they're everyday, the preserve of the geographically particular, and they come complete with laggy update and slow loading. What happened to timed IP? It's coming I guess.

The film, that was interesting too. A fairly simple recombination of old themes and current media foci, proficiently brought together in a very easy to digest whole. The visuals were nice, the mood was just right, and the visual cues were perfect, there was no clubbing you over the head with the key plot points, but everything was present and correct. As far as I could tell.

It got me thinking. [minor spoiler ahead] The part where Shaw kills the senator and his daughter seems so out of place at the time, but then the revelation that his ambitious mother put him up to it [end of spoiler] serves as a timely reminder that human nature hasn't progressed in the same way that technology has. Visions of cavemen in shirts and ties, turning up to work with swish laptops and fancy watches spring to mind. Yay for caricatures. Then we watch those cavemen running the United States of America, and telling us what it means to be moral. EDIT: Not forgetting that in this instance 'caveman' refers to the common consciousness of caveman, not the less politically incorrect view of 'cavemen' that I prefer. Why oh why did I succumb to such prejudiced concept choice? Ho hum...

The film also seemed to be a veritable montage of idealistic political opinion and suggestion. It seemed to me that virtually all the background material had been carefully selected, including the news tickers on the various TV broadcasts and the contents of background TV broadcasts. Having one of the key characters walking through a school play fitted in well with the context, and the parallelism was very apt. The brainwashing in the film was clearly exaggeration for the sake of making a point, but the parallel with school kids provided a neat stepping stone onto some more down-to-earth problems.

The film clearly seemed to be a platform for peddling left-wing viewpoints, wrapped up in current issues and parlance. It makes me wonder to what extent 'meme-placement' in films is becoming commonplace. And to what extent it is moral or not.

An absolutely neutral film would be verging on impossible to produce, and would probably taste like the plastic food we're all getting accustomed to, so why not introduce all sorts of background elements that fit in with your message? I think the key point is that subtly choosing background elements smacks a lot of attempting to subliminally influence the audience. But even if you don't subtly choose anything choices are made, by people, and choices are never neutral, maybe especially when they aren't consciously considered. So which is better, being prey to the memes that propogate themselves under the radar or being aware of what you're transmitting and accepting it?

Nowadays I'm inclined to go down the road of awareness and acceptance, rather than ignorance and denial. (Although I admit the discussion is a lot more complicated than that, and that I've loaded the description badly... ho hum. Just my honest-memes going and making my writing clumsy and 'transparent') And I'm also inclined to say that the argument that proposes that this is unfair on people with insufficient capacity or attention to vet their senses is a dodgy argument. People adapt to their environments, and as long as we have unscrupulous people propogating dodgy self-serving content it's up to those with a conscience to outrace them as hard as possible. And we have a big advantage: we can work together much more, and much more transparently.