The Ancient Game of Go
What is Go? It's a 4,000 year old board game! You
saw Russell Crowe play Go in the movie A Beautiful
Mind as
John Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician.
Perhaps you saw Go in the cult film, PI, a fictional story about
mathematicians. Go is also featured in the novels, "The Master of
Go" by
Yasunari Kawabata, another
Nobel Prize winner, "Shibumi" by Trevanian, "Starborne" by Robert
Silverberg, and "The Girl Who Played Go" by Shan Sa. Fans of
Japanese anime cartoons and manga comics will enjoy the
Hikaru No Go stories about a boy and his ghostly
ancestor, a long dead master of Go, whose adventures revolve around
playing the game.
Why will geocachers like this game?
One of the legends about the origin of Go says that its Chinese
inventor intended the
grid of intersecting lines
(19x19) on the board to represent the Earth. The four corners are
the four cardinal directions: north, south, east, and west, so a Go
board is much like the GPS coordinate system. The lines can
represent latitude and longitude, and the intersections are
waypoints. For centuries, the military, government, and corporate
leaders in China, Japan, and Korea have been playing Go as an
exercise in long-range planning and strategy. See this
article on Chinese strategy at the U.S. Army War
College. Last, but not least, Alex Jarrett, founder of The Degree
Confluence Project, once played Go at
N43, W73 in Vermont. More recently, The Ancient Game
of Go II geocache was created by a Go player in New
Hampshire.
The Cache Box and Terrain
This geocache is a military surplus ammobox hidden in
Westminster Park. The small, steep-sided hills, like the one you'll
see at the cache site, are called
drumlins. It will be impossible to find this
cache under snow. Real geocachers will take the more
challenging approach from Euclid Avenue. Get ready to pump those
quads as you climb what the locals call A Thousand Steps! Students
at Syracuse University in the early 70's called it the Stairway to
Heaven. Governor Schwarzenegger says, "Wimpy, girly-man geocachers
can drive up Westminster Avenue."
Do not add anything to the cache box - that
includes travel bugs. This is a
letterbox-hybrid geocache in a little-known city
park. Let's reduce traffic to a minimum to keep the cache secure.
Follow letterboxing tradition, and bring a rubberstamp to mark the
logbook. Then use the Yin-Yang stamp and ink pad in the cache box
to mark your own logbook. Please take a free copy of The Way to Go booklet to learn about the
history of the game and its very simple rules. If you happen to
take the last booklet in the cache box, state that in your log and
I will add more. Consider visiting the local
Go club. Several Syracuse Go players are also
geocachers!
As the Japanese say when starting a new game of Go: "O negai
shimasu!"