It is really boring to take the same four mile walk every morning, despite the occasional rabbit or Blue Heron or deer, so I have lots of time to think. As I was passing the semi-circular grassy space in front of the entrance to the Mason Farm Waste Water Treatment Facility on Old Mason Farm Road, I saw a black car parked right up against the tree line, with someone inside. On my way home, I noticed that a red car had pulled in right next to the black one. Since at that point it was 6:45 a.m., I figured it was two workers waiting to go to work. The two cars put me in mind of my post about Tibetan restaurants and the economics of location [marred, alas, by my ignorance of the fact that there are at least six Tibetan restaurants in the fifth arrondissement, not two as I claimed.] But since the two cars were in a two-dimensional space, not on line, I began to wonder what the solution to the location problem would be in two dimensions. And this -- my mind being rather oddly wired -- made me think of the game of Go. In my youth, I played a good deal of Go. I was never more than a patzer, as they say in the chess world, but I did develop some sense of strategy, as opposed to simple two or three move tactics, and I learned that in the opening, the right thing to do is to place one's stones near the border, maybe three rows in, and slightly off center from the large dots spaced out on the board at certain intersections. It occurred to me that maybe great Go players place their stones in a manner that accords with the solution to the two-dimensional economics of location problem.
Are there any Go-playing topologists out there who can throw some light on this?
