To protect and secure information requires flexible strategies. GO—an ancient Asian board game, one of the oldest games in existence—contains some surprising insights in how to meld intuition, knowledge and experience to generate a winning strategy. GO uses the most elemental materials and concepts—line and circle, wood and stone, black and white—combining them with simple rules to generate subtle strategies and complex tactics that stagger the imagination.

The computer can't beat a human at GO, at least not those who have played it for longer than a month. To play GO one needs to recognize patterns, rely on intuition, and anticipate moves, taking the full board into account. These are attributes of human intelligence that the brute force of computer processing power cannot live up to yet, if ever. For example, IBM's supercomputer Deep Blue would ponder over a single move for three minutes, calculating a mind-numbing 200 million chess positions per second in its epic victory over World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. The same depth of move contemplation would take Deep Blue 1.5 years to mull over in a matchup with GO, and then it most likely would still make the wrong move. "GO may be," as one journalist from the Dallas Morning News writes, "the last refuge of human intelligence." Or, at least, as one programmer claims, "the Holy Grail of computer programming" and "the biggest challenge in computer science."