For as long as we can tell, humankind has played board games. Some of these games involved chance and were designed to entertain as well as to pass the time. But there have always been, among those games certain select titles that stood out as different. These games were not decided by dice or the luck of the draw. These games were based on heuristics and represented a fair test of each participant's mental prowess. These were the logic games.
Apart from Chess and Checkers and Tic Tac Toe, it is hard to think of any logic game that was not developed in the past couple decades. By logic game, I am referring to games that do not produce random outcomes by use of dice, cards, spinning wheels, etc. Considering the above mentioned games, most would quickly eliminate Checkers and Tic Tac Toe as being somewhat too shallow to count among the great mental trainers of history. So this raises the question, is chess really all there is? Of interest in this discussion is the following joke I recently came across.
The inexperienced apprentice asked her master "What is the deepest game ever invented?" The master responded after a moment's consideration "It would Chess. Wouldn't it?" The apprentice interjected "What about Go?" The master responded "Well, Go was already there!"
Although I referred to the above story as a Chess joke, it is probably more of a Go joke. But what is GO? Consider the words of once Chess world champion, Emanuel Lasker (1894-1921). He said that since the rules and design of Chess are so Baroque in nature, the game pretty much advertises that it is man-made. However Mr. Lasker said that the rules of Go are so "elegant, organic, and rigorously logical" that if there were sentient beings on any other planet they must also be players of go. This strong praise for Go came from a chess champion which raises certain questions. What is this logic game called GO? And who plays it?
There is an ancient Go proverb that reads "A few moments to learn, a lifetime to master." It is true that the rules of Go are few and simple. One can play their first game after only a couple minutes of explanation. Yet the game is so profound that despite decades of effort, no individual or group has been able to program a computer player that can beat a professional Go player. The game is just too subtle and complex for a computer to play against trained human intuition. The intuitive factor lends a whole additional layer of meaning to this logic game. Current estimates place the worldwide Go playing community at just over 25 million. The game is Chinese in origin and is believed to be 4 thousand years old.
Most Westerners who play Go learned of it from Japanese players, literature, and Television broadcasts although the game is very popular in Korea and China as well. It is widely understood to impart intellectual benefits to young and old alike as it develops analytical skills and even memory. Some in Japan use it for therapy for sufferers of mental illness. There are several online memory trainers and cognitive improvement products and their popularity seems to be rising. If this area is of interest to you, you might do yourself a favor by investigating the ancient logic game of Go before subscribing to one of the online brain training services.
About the Author:
Want to find out more about logic games, then visit Stan Barry's site on how to choose the best brain training game for your needs.
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