Online platforms jump on the Go bandwagon

The recent win of Google Inc's artificial intelligence program AlphaGo over South Korea's Lee Sel-do, one of the world's best Go players, has reignited my enthusiasm over the ancient Chinese board game. It also makes me recall how I first fell in love with it.

It was in 1985, when Chinese Go grandmaster Nie Weiping defeated Japanese elite players one by one for the first time in a tournament. It was shortly after China started to open up to the outside world and was craving for anything that would help lift national morale. China Central Television broadcast his games live, and Nie became a household name overnight. You were out if you knew nothing about Go, or weiqi in Chinese, at that time.

So I started to learn to play, by reading books and watching lessons on TV, which was not very hard, and tried to seize every chance to hone my newly acquired skill. Yet finding someone at a comparable level and who was willing to play with me, in a certain place at a certain time, proved far more difficult. The process, which cost me a lot of time and gave me many headaches, finally sapped me of any impulse to play.