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Comment by resoluteteeth | Hacker News Reader

Atari is also a term from the game go. Based on the Atari logo it is obvious that this is the source of the name (the logo resembles the simplest atari configuration in go), and wikipedia confirms this:

> Before Atari's incorporation, Bushnell considered various terms from the game go, eventually choosing atari, referencing a position in the game when a group of stones is imminently in danger of being taken by one's opponent.

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Now that you mentioned it, the first association that came to my mind is with the character 八 (eight) which is part of 八つ当たり (yatsuatari), which in turn means venting anger or frustration on someone who does not deserve it. Heh.

I'm learning Japanese and this is quite an interesting thing to hear. I am surprised by the number of things that do not quite have a simple analogue in English. It's a nice and compact phrase, though of course the danger with many of these is that they may be uncommon so risky to use, especially as a learner.

I'm actually not a native speaker either (I'm Finnish).

I think 八つ当たり might derive from the same idea as 八方 which means "every direction" even though it's literally "eight directions". I'm guessing the idea is that you're hitting things all over the place, even if it's not a suitable target.

EDIT: oh, I forgot to add that 八つ当たり is very common, so you definitely should look out for it to get an idea of how and when to use it.

I don't see the resemblance between the Atari logo and anything on a Go board?

The middle line is being compressed by the two lines on the side, and it is either escaping or being completely engulfed depending on whether you read it up or down. I never saw the resemblance before, but it was pretty obvious once it was mentioned. I'm also around 5k go rating.

Can you link to the Atari logo that looks like this? I can only find the 3 lines "mountain/A" logo.

That's the logo I meant. I mean it's not an exact depiction of the position in go, but I had imaged that the three lines were an abstracted representation of three black stones on three sides of a white stone that's not depicted in the logo.

Actually it seems like this is just a coincidence though (and it wasn't supposed to represent a mountain either):

> Opperman designed it with two things in mind: the first was that the overall silhouette was to look like the letter A, matching that of the company, while the second was that its three "prongs" were based on Atari's first hit game, Pong.

http://kotaku.com/5864035/the-glory-of-ataris-original-logo

How about the other way around?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Atari.pn...

(imagine it upside down)

I thought it was a term from Shogi, meaning "Check!", equivalent to the term in chess.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Go_terms#Atari

In go, you capture your opponent's pieces by surrounding them, and "atari" is when a group of pieces will be captured with one more move. It's comparable to a "check", in its own way.

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