The thing I find fascinating, is not that Go was invented only once, but that it didn't spread to the West until 1880.

Chess, by contrast, propagated rapidly throughout the Old World.

I don't have an explanation for this. It seems curious.

Well, sort of. Chess spread from India, but in many different forms. The form we call "chess" today is only around 500 years old, although the original game is over 2000 years old. And even today, the Chinese and Japanese have chess games distinct from Western chess (Xiangqi and Shogi respectively). It's interesting that Go didn't similarly "speciate". Perhaps because unlike chess, there wasn't the multitude of pieces and movements that seemed arbitrary.

It did, though. Go, I mean.

Korea had Sunjang Baduk: https://senseis.xmp.net/?SunjangBaduk

Tibet had its own variant: https://senseis.xmp.net/?TibetanGo

I didn't meant to imply that chess didn't mutate as it travelled around. It's still striking to me that Go was unknown anywhere which didn't use Hanzi to write.

I think if Go hadn't been already known, it would have been discovered in the twentieth century.

Dozens, if not hundreds, of other abstract games were, and I don't think there are many as simple.

It's not so obvious that anyone would have noticed how good a game it can be.

That's a rough thought. Imagine if Go were roughly as popular as, say, Tri-Ominoes, and wasn't taken seriously enough to develop the truly competitive tournament scene it has today.

I want to say that board game players are pretty good at recognizing strategic depth, and that good games naturally rise to the top and become widespread, and their mechanics are reused and evolved in further board games. You certainly see this with Euro-style board games at least.

The universe is a little bit bigger that earth, especially outside our observable light cone. If there is alien intelligence out there, it is reasonable to assume that a game mathematically equivalent to go has been invented elsewhere. (Because I feel like if there are any other alien intelligences out there, there would be a very, very large number of them. The anthropic principle might explain a single intelligent species, but just 2 or even 1 million seems very unlikely given the quantities involved)

Go is a pretty generic game that leans heavily on basic mathematics and geometry (which are universal). You really think it could only be invented by humans? Why?

"It could only be invented by humans" is a very different statement to "no aliens will have invented it". That's making an ought out of an is.

The intention of the GP was - given that Go was not invented again on Earth, there's no real indication that it would be invented again at all. That doesn't imply that it cannot be invented again because it is too complex.

I'm not following how this logically follows at all. It was invented here, so if anything, its invention here is a great data point that it could easily be invented elsewhere too (take a Bayesian approach to it). I don't see how its invention here somehow counts as evidence against it being invented elsewhere! There are an infinite number of games that haven't been invented here; all of those would seem to be much less likely to exist elsewhere than ones that actually were invented here.

Also, it's kind of silly to count something not have being reinvented against it, because things almost by definition cannot be reinvented. Look at how popular board games are right now; if Go hadn't yet been invented, it's quite possible that it would be invented now. But instead it has already been invented, so people already know about it, and any would-be inventors end up not being inventors; they either already know about it or are told that what they've come up with already exists.

> Also, it's kind of silly to count something not have being reinvented against it, because things almost by definition cannot be reinvented.

Well, they can, but the opportunities are limited to cultures where the game has not been introduced yet.

I would also point out that we don't know that Go was never invented independently on earth, just that it was never invented and popularized in a manner that left a cultural or historic record of which we are aware. If Go were played by a small clan of prehistoric people using different color berries and a grid scratched out in the dirt, what evidence would be left?

So that REALLY limits the opportunities to cultures that left a significant historic record but had no cultural exchange with china.

That's an argument that only works on logicians, along the lines of "every dice with enough sides is actually rigged to the first number it lands on". If a particular consequence is exceptional (the invention of Go), but some consequence is inevitable (the invention of a board game to pass the time of some people in China), analysis after the fact has limited meaning.

> "It could only be invented by humans" is a very different statement to "no aliens will have invented it". That's making an ought out of an is.

Not quite. It's making a must out of an is. The relevant distinction is "true by necessity" vs "true by coincidence", not "factually correct" vs "morally correct".

No, he points out that even other humans haven't done so.

I'm not following. The universe is unbelievably vast, and likely has many, many more magnitudes of intelligent species out there than we have had cultures down here on this one planet.

I don't want to get into arguing Drake's equation here, but if you accept that aliens exist, then you're granting that there's a lot of them; it makes no sense why we would be, e.g., one of only two intelligent species in the entire universe.

It's an argument against the "naturalness" or inevitability of the discovery.

It may be wrong, but "aliens" is not a response to it.

If I'm understanding correctly, the sticking point here (and in most of the thread) is people arguing about different things. Some people are saying the discovery of Go is inevitable (certain?), some are saying it's likely (but not inevitable), some are saying it's possible (but not likely).