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Comment by wtbob | Hacker News Reader

> Crazy Stone and Nomitan are locked in a game of Go, the Eastern version of chess.

Ummm, the Japanese version of chess is…chess. It's called shogi. There's also a Chinese version of chess, xiangqi. There are, I believe, Vietnamese, Korean, Burmese and perhaps other varieties of chess. There's certainly no common 'Eastern version of chess' any more than there's a common 'Easter version of food.'

Go is a Japanese game of considerably greater complexity than chess.

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Go is not a Japanese game, though. It was originated in China more than 2000 years ago. It is very popular in both China, Japan, and South Korea. [I don't know how it is in North Korea.]

North Korea has a number of strong players--probably better than those in Europe and the US. They've competed in a few international events.

As "an abstract strategy game that is considered culturally to be a symbol of intelligence, deep thought and deep tradition", the analogy works for me.

Chess as an indication of intelligence is an American cultural quirk. In other parts of the world, people just think that means someone is good at chess.

I can't speak to the rest of the world, I was honestly thinking more of Turkey than America (where I spent hours and hours ruining my college career through this game, a national obsession second only to backgammon).

I was under the impression that this was true of Russia as well. It's certainly not universal, though.

I think it's all over eastern Europe, Slavic, and Turkic areas anyway. Maybe a generational thing too.

There should be a term for this sort of error, in which one notices that some phenomenon isn't necessarily universal and then condemns the provincialism of those who think it is common, when in fact the phenomenon in question happens to be quite common.

Am I condemning it or just pointing it out as a faulty assumption? I don't see any adjectives like provincial in my comment. In the context of this thread, a game's analogous position to chess is predicated on it being seen as a sign of intelligence. One cannot simply assume that such games are seen by all cultures as signs of intelligence. In fact, one might ask: What kind of intelligence for which culture, exactly?

Natural intelligence aside, it's certainly been a leading, news-making target (and best analogy) for artificial intelligence work, as long as I've followed AI. Since the 1970s at least, I've been reading articles about trying to beat chess and go as major milestones, but not Shogi.

In case it wasn't clear, by "the phenomenon" I meant the widespread existence of a belief that chess skill and general intelligence are positively correlated. As attested in this thread, the phenomenon exists in North America and in much of Europe. In my experience it is common in East Asia as well, although in many places the emphasis is more on go than on chess. Is it wrong to say this phenomenon is common?

How sure are you that you haven't missed any nuances? I bet you just did a loose pattern match with your own cultural notions and moved on. This is precisely my point.

(EDIT: This one is going to be especially tricky, since everyone from the generations around ours and younger has been inundated with TV and movies from the US, and the "Chess Player is a genius" trope is all over that.)

At this point I'm just confused. If you want to maintain that "Chess as an indication of intelligence is an American cultural quirk" then please do so. The rest of us will try to be satisfied with our apparently superficial understandings of various cultures. I would like to visit a place where chess is the game for dullards, so cheers if you have any advice on that.

Go is actually a Chinese game, it's just that the Westerners learned about it from Japan and thus adopted all the Japanese terminologies.

Wasn't chess invented in India? Chess itself is the eastern version of chess haha.

More like invented in Persia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chess

First paragraph of article body: "Chess was introduced to Persia from India and became a part of the princely or courtly education of Persian nobility."

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