I read The Master of Go (Vintage) by Yasunari Kawabata on the way back from visiting my grandma in Taipei. Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, and The Master of Go is his semi-fictional account of a six-month match played between an aged Go master and a younger challenger. Hon’inbō Shūsai is a meijin, the last of the prestigious Hon’inbō school of Go. Shūsai’s play is stylistic. He is skeptical of novelty. He takes his time. He makes small moves with a bigger picture in mind. His opponent, Kitani Minoru, is pragmatic. Kawabata explores the contrasting styles of play between the two men against the backdrop of mid-twentieth century Japan, where, much as in my grandma’s Taiwan, old aesthetics have been buried by rapid industrialization and, later, by post-war reconstruction. After 237 moves, Kitani wins the match by five points, but not before Shūsai’s constitution gives way. Shūsai’s death, we learn in the opening chapter, occurs not more than a year after the completion of the match.

For those interested in learning more about the game of Go, there’s a fascinating documentary on Netflix called AlphaGo. It chronicles a momentous series of matches between Lee Sedol, one of top Go players in the world at the time, and AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence program developed by Google DeepMind. The founders of DeepMind sought to develop a program with machine-learning algorithms sophisticated enough to play and win in Go at the professional level. Go is arguably the hardest board game to learn due to the number of possibilities a player can make in a single move. It is the ultimate challenge for artificial intelligence, magnitudes more difficult than chess. In a way, AlphaGo parallels Master of Go. Lee Sedol is stunningly defeated by the machine in the five matches. He gets more and more disoriented as, in match after match, he comes up short, while the machine gets smarter from playing him. And yet, unlike somber Kawabata, the documentary ends with a dash of Silicon Valley optimism, showing how something fabricated can help push the human spirit further and chart new frontiers of creativity. After all, Lee Sedol does not get swept. He holds on to one victory, and that feels enough for us mortals.