This Is Not a Game

摘要

Aja Huang dips his hand into a wooden bowl of polished black stones and, without looking, thumbs one between his middle and index finger. Peering through wire-rim glasses, he places the black stone on the board, in a mostly empty zone, just below and to the left of a single white stone. In Go parlance it is a "shoulder hit," in from the side, far away from most of the game's other action. Across the table, Lee Sedol, the best Go player of the past decade, freezes. He looks at the 37 stones fanned out across the board, then stands up and leaves. In the commentary room, about 50 feet away, Michael Redmond is watching the game via closed-circuit. Redmond, the only Western Go player to reach the rank of nine dan, the game's uppermost designation, literally does a double take. He is just as shocked as Lee. "I don't really know if it's a good move or a bad move," Redmond says to the nearly 2 million people following the game online.