We play Go. It turns out that my ignorance of the game does not make me a tedious opponent because one of the ways in which Go is not like chess is that there are no prescribed openings as such. There are familiar patterns that quickly yield to uniquenesses, and what appears to be a mistake may become a fulcrum whose existence and position enables something remarkable. It is about identity as much as strategy. It is also profoundly difficult for computers to understand. Even a smallish chess machine can beat most players—but until very recently the very best Go simulator still struggled with an average human opponent. Now that has changed, but it happened by making a different kind of step altogether. Effectively, the digital Go master is not a machine at all, but a simulated person whose consciousness only extends to Go.