Lots of animals love to play — many of us mammals will forgo food and sleep just to take part in exploratory fun. Humans have excelled at a specific type of play that comes in the form of games.
Games are more formal than most types of play. They involve rules and have uncertain outcomes . . . And one of the very oldest is the Ancient Chinese game called “Go.” You see here a Go board from the Sui Dynasty (581-618) made out of white ceramics. In Go, two players compete by trying to surround their opponent’s tokens while attempting to prevent their own pieces from being surrounded. Go is the oldest continuously played board game in history.
The origins of Go are explained in several myths: perhaps it was originally used as a divination practice. Maybe it was created by the Emperor Yao (d 2255 BCE) who wanted his son to learn discipline and focus. Still other sources state that it was developed by military generals to sharpen their battle strategy skills.
Regardless, Go appears in written sources as far back as the fourth century BCE, and physical remains of the game exist from the Western Han Dynasty (206-24 CE). The game has been popular enough and has such simple rules – but so many outcomes – that mathematicians have long studied it. The 11th-century scholar Shen Kuo argued that there are 10 to the power of 172 numbers of possible positions on the board. More recently, the 20th-century mathematician John Horton Conway was inspired by the game to invent “surreal numbers”, which requires a lot higher level of mathematic expertise than I have to explain.
