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The Chinese game of weiqi and its Korean and Japanese derivatives,
baduk and go, comprise East Asia’s consummate
board game of skill. At least as old as chess, and arguably even
more intellectually challenging, weiqi seems deceptively
simple at first glance. The game is played by two players on a board
marked with a grid (now standardized at nineteen by nineteen lines),
each player using a set of identical disk-shaped pieces. The players
take turns placing their pieces on the interstices of the grid in
an attempt to surround each other’s pieces, and the winner
of the game is the player who ends up with the most pieces that
are not surrounded. Despite its apparent simplicity—the rules
are few and the pieces have no directional moves as in chess—the
possible permutations are almost infinite. It is significant that
weiqi has become a favorite game of mathematicians in the
West. At present, no computer has been able to defeat the top players,
which suggests that the game requires a type of predictive ability
that is not purely mathematical.
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Scholars Playing Weiqi under Pine Trees
China; Yuan dynasty (1279–1368)
Hanging scroll, ink and colors on silk; 122.24 x 69.06 cm
Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Gift of funds from Ruth and Bruce
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