Weiqi: the Chinese game of go, the art of encircling

On a grid of pale wood, two players place a stone in turn, black then white, in silence. No pieces that move, no coloured squares: only bare intersections that, little by little, cover themselves with constellations. Where the novice eye sees only a grid, the initiate reads borders, invasions, territories taking shape. This game of absolute soberness, perhaps the deepest ever invented, is weiqi.

Weiqi, known in the West by its Japanese name go and in Korea as baduk, is a two-player strategy game born in China more than two thousand five hundred years ago. Its rules fit in a few lines; its depth, however, defies the human mind as it long defied machines. To understand it is to touch a certain Chinese idea of thought and balance.

A game more than two millennia old#

Weiqi ranks among the oldest board games still played in the world. Chinese sources mention it from antiquity, and tradition lends it a legendary origin more than four thousand years old — a charming but unverifiable account. What history documents with certainty is its well-established presence under the Zhou dynasty and its rise during the following centuries.

The game is played on a goban, a grid of 19 lines by 19, that is 361 intersections. Each player has stones of one colour — black for one, white for the other — which they place in turn on the empty intersections. Once placed, a stone no longer moves: the whole art lies in choosing where to put it.

In weiqi, you move nothing: you build, intersection after intersection, a landscape of territories and borders.

Simple rules, dizzying depth#

The aim of weiqi is to control the most territory on the board. The founding rule is that of encirclement: a stone or a group of stones surrounded on all sides by the opponent, deprived of their "liberties" (the adjacent empty intersections), are captured and removed from the game. From this single mechanic is born an almost unfathomable complexity.

There lies the paradox of weiqi: its rules are learned in a few minutes, but its mastery takes a lifetime. The number of possible games surpasses understanding — greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe — which makes it a privileged field of study for mathematicians and artificial-intelligence researchers. Where chess values head-on calculation, weiqi rewards intuition, the overall vision and a sense of balance.

A scholar's art#

In China, weiqi was not a mere pastime: it figured among the four arts that every accomplished scholar was expected to master, alongside the guqin (the zither), calligraphy and painting. To play weiqi was to cultivate one's mind, exercise one's patience and display an inner elegance as much as a strategic intelligence.

From China, the game spread throughout East Asia. It reached Japan, where it became go (囲碁, igo) and professionalised from the Edo period around rival schools; it took root in Korea under the name baduk, where it ranks among the national disciplines. One and the same game, three names, a single shared fascination.

AlphaGo, or the day the machine won#

For decades, weiqi remained the last bastion of board games against computers. Where chess had yielded in 1997 with Deep Blue's victory over Garry Kasparov, go resisted: its combinatorial complexity made brute calculation powerless, and it was thought it would take decades more for a machine to beat the best humans.

Everything changed in 2016. The program AlphaGo, developed by DeepMind and based on deep learning, beat the Korean champion Lee Sedol by four victories to one, in a match followed by millions of spectators in Asia. AlphaGo's "move 37," first judged aberrant then brilliant, entered into legend. This moment marked a turning point in the history of artificial intelligence — and gave the oldest game in the world a stunning topicality.

From the goban of the Zhou scholars to the servers of DeepMind, weiqi crosses the ages without losing any of its mystery. To discover it is to learn to think differently — and to learn Chinese is to be able to read the names of the moves, understand why "to encircle" is worth more than "to destroy" and enter a tradition of thought two and a half millennia old.

FAQ#

What is weiqi? Weiqi (围棋) is a two-player Chinese strategy game, known in the West by the Japanese name go and in Korea as baduk. Players place black and white stones in turn on a 19x19 grid to control the most territory by encircling the opponent.

What is the difference between weiqi, go and baduk? They are the same game under three names: weiqi in Chinese (its language of origin), go (or igo) in Japanese, baduk in Korean. The rules are identical; only the local traditions and terminologies differ.

Is weiqi harder than chess? In combinatorial terms, weiqi offers a number of possible games far greater than that of chess, which long made it more resistant to computers. Its rules are nonetheless simpler: the difficulty lies in the strategic depth and the intuition required.

What is AlphaGo? AlphaGo is an artificial-intelligence program developed by DeepMind. In 2016, it beat the Korean champion Lee Sedol at go by 4 victories to 1, a historic event that marked a turning point in the development of deep learning.

Photo credits: the images used in this article come from Pexels and Unsplash and are royalty-free.