apteryx is doing homework catch-up for a class he just added
In Go, the object is to take the most territory (space on the board) for yourself. A principle that is commonly taught is: “Always play the biggest move.” The “biggest move” is the one that shifts the balance of territory the furthest in your favor (by reducing your opponent’s territory and/or increasing your own). Like duh, of course you should always play the biggest move, right?
Wrong. A crazy Australian friend of mine told me a much better principle when we played Go at Park House in San Diego: Play the most interesting move.
This is the move that throws previous assumptions about who owned what into doubt, and opens up new and unpredictable possibilities. The most interesting move makes the game more richly interconnected, less certain, and more…interesting. The kind of structure that your pieces make when you play interesting moves is less knowable than when you play safe moves, but also more resilient and adaptive.
The truth is, “play the biggest move” is a vacuous principle in practice. To apply that principle assumes that you can tell what the biggest move is—that is, that you understand the situation so thoroughly that you can actually know the future implications of every move. In a real game, you are always up against the fact that most of the game is unpredictable. What you can sense, though, is the moves that steer the game outside of its present course and open up new possibilities for interconnection, even though you can’t tell exactly how those possibilities will play out.
Real life is the same way, of course.
So, I’m making this a goal of the sort that I never complete, but execute continuously. As of today, this is my #1 guiding heuristic in life.
