r/baduk • u/DrSparkle713 8 kyu • 4d ago
Go spotting in Richard Feynman's memoir
I now know I missed my calling. I should have been a quantum physicist studying at Princeton in the 40s. Alas.
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u/s-mores 1k 4d ago
I had the first move.
My play was perfect.
You should not have won.
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u/Crono9987 5d 4d ago
love that movie but as a go player that scene was a bit painful
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u/Necessary_Dance_159 4d ago
It's not a scene meant to make Nash look sympathetic. He had an ego and got embarrassed for it. Go is very good at that!
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u/HenryBlatbugIII 4d ago
Yeah, but it wasn't just "Nash plays extremely badly and claims he's perfect". It was also the fact that they seemingly only got one move on camera while zooming in on the board and showed it multiple times during the scene. (The move they caught was also a painful one: Nash is caught in a connect-and-die, and he connects so he loses two huge heavy chains instead of one.)
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u/gennan 3d 3d ago
"Nash plays extremely badly and claims he's perfect"
Sounds a bit like Trump.
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u/HenryBlatbugIII 2d ago
Please don't compare the US president to someone who was struggling with untreated schizophrenia.
It's unfair to John Nash.
2
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u/teffflon 2 kyu 4d ago
This same Princeton common-room milieu is where, 8-9 years later, John Nash would reinvent and start to popularize the game of Hex. The mathematician John Conway, who made decisive contributions to the mathematics of turn-based games, also played a lot of common-room games starting as a Cambridge student (backgammon) and throughout his early career. I believe his collaborator (and great Go-endgame theorist) Elwyn Berlekamp was similar.