I assume that the point this post is making is that the cerebral logic exercised by the spinning wheel must be much richer, as you’re performing an optimization in continuous physical space, which requires coordination of many muscles in very subtle ways, which depend quite specifically on your orientation and position on the wheel; whereas (supposedly) Go is very discrete and thus can’t necessitate the same degree of cognitive complexity/multidimensionality. Managing to stand and walk on uneven terrain is something that our cerebral machine has been trained for as long as things have legs (i.e. around 350 million years) and prepared before, and it has remained a crucial element of evolutionary fitness, so must have been honed for all this time to great precision. I don’t doubt that there is more “total depth” in processes involving physical interaction.
However, Go is a process which we perform consciously, as opposed to walking and staying upright, which is overwhelmingly unconscious. There is little conscious depth, i.e. depth that we can introspect, experience or enjoy. We don’t think much about which specific centimeter we’ll place our foot at, we just feel the correct motion and perform it. We could probably reduce the problem to a mathematical model, but that would forgo the depth we’ve assigned it above (the resulting complexity would be comparable to Go). In Go, we are able to analyze the step and introspect its decision process, to—if desired—absolute precision, while still observing the heuristic that produced the step (unconsciously). That’s the depth I find stimulating and interesting. I’m aware of no person that has been enjoying spinning wheels for years, hours a day...
(Also, FTR, Go and even Tic-tac-toe typically have humans sitting opposite you, interaction with which is just as deep and more fulfilling than running endlessly on your lonely spinning wheel!)
Edit: After actually following the vendor link in the post, I see that there is potential for interactive multiplayer fun on these. The above reflects purely on solo player experience (or for Go, playing online/against an engine). Not sure if anyone would want to play on these for years with other people either, though.
I assume that the point this post is making is that the cerebral logic exercised by the spinning wheel must be much richer, as you’re performing an optimization in continuous physical space, which requires coordination of many muscles in very subtle ways, which depend quite specifically on your orientation and position on the wheel; whereas (supposedly) Go is very discrete and thus can’t necessitate the same degree of cognitive complexity/multidimensionality. Managing to stand and walk on uneven terrain is something that our cerebral machine has been trained for as long as things have legs (i.e. around 350 million years) and prepared before, and it has remained a crucial element of evolutionary fitness, so must have been honed for all this time to great precision. I don’t doubt that there is more “total depth” in processes involving physical interaction.
However, Go is a process which we perform consciously, as opposed to walking and staying upright, which is overwhelmingly unconscious. There is little conscious depth, i.e. depth that we can introspect, experience or enjoy. We don’t think much about which specific centimeter we’ll place our foot at, we just feel the correct motion and perform it. We could probably reduce the problem to a mathematical model, but that would forgo the depth we’ve assigned it above (the resulting complexity would be comparable to Go). In Go, we are able to analyze the step and introspect its decision process, to—if desired—absolute precision, while still observing the heuristic that produced the step (unconsciously). That’s the depth I find stimulating and interesting. I’m aware of no person that has been enjoying spinning wheels for years, hours a day...
(Also, FTR, Go and even Tic-tac-toe typically have humans sitting opposite you, interaction with which is just as deep and more fulfilling than running endlessly on your lonely spinning wheel!)
Edit: After actually following the vendor link in the post, I see that there is potential for interactive multiplayer fun on these. The above reflects purely on solo player experience (or for Go, playing online/against an engine). Not sure if anyone would want to play on these for years with other people either, though.