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Go Spotting: Wired Mag on Network Science, Go and Inscrutable Hairballs

Two French scientists have decided to apply network science to the game of go, according to a 2012 report on the Wired blog we just came across. "They constructed their networks in a simple way," Samuel Arbesman reported in Network Science of the Game of Go (4/20/2012). "If one board position can lead to another, they are connected. Using a dataset of about 1,000 professional games and 4,000 amateur games, they began to construct these networks." Arbesman says the network analyses in the paper "are a bit odd, though they find many classic graph structures, such as a heavy-tailed link distribution and high amounts of clustering." And though the networks constructed from amateur and professional games were distinct, Arbesman said that "while I know that network pictures are usually inscrutable hairballs, I was disappointed that networks weren’t visualized at all." Still, he concluded, "this a fun little network analysis and I recommend checking it out." photo courtesy Wired blog