Go and Chess are generally considered to be the paradigm of strategy games and pure intellectual pursuit. But not many people have heard of Go in the western world, at least not compared to Chess. Anyone that likes chess is doing themselves a grave disservice by not at least trying out Go. I learned how to play Go approximately 6 years ago, but only played sporadically until approximately 2 years ago, when i started to play any chance i could. These days, i try to play at least 4 or 5 games a week, and have seen my strength rise dramatically as a result. Frustrated by a lack of people to play against, this is a small attempt of mine to introduce the game to people, in the hopes of increasing its popularity.
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Go
Or, You Can’t Know What You Don’t Know You Can’t Know.
This is an interesting result from modal logic that I will try to sketch here. The upshot of the result, depending on which side of a divide you fall into, is either that there are some truths that are logically impossible to know, or that every truth is already known by someone.
The dividing line in this case is whether you are a realist or anti-realist. The realists posit that there is an external reality that has certain definite properties. The anti-realist deny that such an external reality exists (or, in some cases, that we can have access to it). I’ll get more into this distinction after I sketch the proof. If you find logic boring, feel free to skip the proof and scroll to the end for a brief discussion on the implications of this result.
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Logic, Philosophy