By Bart Barry-
SAN ANTONIO – Nine days since we put an irresponsible number of aficionados in Alamodome this city hasn’t time to calculate new infections because we’re readying for Tuesday’s kickoff of Alamo Bowl – and yes, fans will be in attendance in an indoor stadium yet again because you can’t tell Texans what to do, especially when they’re trying to protect wealthy people’s fortunes for them.
It’s written 30 miles in near every direction from this city: Trump 2020 flags defiantly still flying on poles outside most every ranch. Wealthy ranchers’ enduring fealty to a defrocked and deregulating protector of their interests is understandable, in a shortsighted and greedy kinda way, but I’ll be damned if I can figure what’s in it for their ranches’ hands. Something about culture war this or guns that. Heavens, such aspiring predators are but dimwitted prey.
I started teaching myself the ancient Chinese game of Go a few months back. No, not because I saw A Beautiful Mind – as a few acquaintances asked. Rather it came via what inspiration I feel helping my six-year-old daughter learn how to read.
When we began our weeknightly episodes in August the haul looked impossible. Suddenly something incredibly important to me most of my life, reading, a thing I do not remember learning to do, required immense amounts of memorization and exceptions to rules overwhelming most reasons for committing rules to memory, even. Why isn’t “enough” pronounced enoo if you’re not going to pronounce “through” like throff?
But in four months, against all expectations, my daughter’s speed of reading has improved fivefold. Which set me to wondering if there were an activity at which I might improve myself so much so quickly. I settled on the game of Go.
Years ago a guy in a coffeeshop told me if he were to do it all again for complexity he’d learn Go, not Chess, and towards the end of October I told myself that if I were going to replicate the miracle every first grader accomplishes with phonetics and brute repetition, if I were going to need but a few months to make a 500-percent improvement, why, there was no need to worry about lost time. After all, it’s a relative measure. I’m not trying to beat a 9-dan pro (I’m not even trying to beat her six-year-old daughter); I’m just trying to be five times better in four months than I was when I started. I’m pretty much there, too.
Were I having to find locals with whom to play on a 9×9 board I’d be nowhere near my goal. But thanks to what AlphaGo has wrought there are lots of artificial-intelligence-inspired apps for playing the game against a machine. This allows you to learn via repetition – making similar mistakes and being punished in similar ways thousands of times quickly. (These programs, beginning in the 1950s with machine-learning Checkers, attained their primacy by playing themselves millions of times.) I suspect those of us who learn to play against machines, not humans, will be different sorts of players than those who learn the traditional way. This might worry me if I were trying to become a professional or even a competent amateur, but since I’m only trying to be better compared to myself, well.
All of this has a bit to do with how I saw Canelo Alvarez’s undressing of Callum Smith, believe it or not. In Go there’s fighting and there’s acquiring territory, and they’re only the same thing to beginners. One wins at Go by acquiring territory, not winning fights.
When you start playing, though, especially as a westerner, you tend to shortcircuit with a misplaced pride that makes you hit back every time you’re struck. He takes two of your stones, you take three of his! You obsess yourself with a single fight in a small corner of the board and keep your eyes set till you’ve won. Then you look up and see you’ve lost the game, bigly, while fixating on your terrible little patch.
Callum Smith didn’t obsess in any such way, a couple Saturdays ago, but he looked up at the closing bell of every round and seemed surprised to have lost so dramatically. There were invisible lines on the mat, lines and rules visible only to Canelo, and Smith didn’t even know he crossed them, or Canelo crossed them. But those lines told Canelo all he needed to know; so long as his lead foot got to position A within three steps, it didn’t matter what Smith’s jab or hook did. Smith was so badly overmatched, so elegantly handicapped by Canelo’s prowess, he would need to fight that exact same Canelo making those exact same moves a dozen times before he’d have a chance at a draw, and 50 times before he’d win a decision.
Impressive to be so many levels beyond a Ring super middleweight champion.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry