Correction Appended

DEEP BLUE's recent trouncing of Garry Kasparov sent shock waves through the Western world. In much of the Orient, however, the news that a computer had beaten a chess champion was likely to have been met with a yawn.

While there are avid chess players in Japan, China, Korea and throughout the East, far more popular is the deceptively simple game of Go, in which black and white pieces called stones are used to form intricate, interlocking patterns that sprawl across the board. So subtle and beautiful is this ancient game that, to hear aficionados describe it, Go is to chess what Asian martial arts like aikido are to a boxing match.

And, Go fans proudly note, a computer has not come close to mastering what remains a uniquely human game.

Over the last decade, inspired in part by a $1.4 million prize offered by a Taiwanese organization for a computer program that can beat a champion human player, designers have been coming up with better and better Go-playing machines. Later this year, about $25,000 in prizes will be given to the best programs in two annual international contests in Japan and the United States.

As impressive as the winners of these tournaments have been, they can still be defeated by even an amateur player with perhaps a year's experience.

Deep Blue defeated the world chess champion by leveraging a moderate amount of chess knowledge with a huge amount of blind, high-speed searching power.

But this roughshod approach is powerless against the intricacies of Go, leaving computers at a distinct disadvantage. ''Brute-force searching is completely and utterly worthless for Go,'' said David Fotland, a computer engineer for Hewlett-Packard who is the author of one of the strongest programs, called The Many Faces of Go. ''You have to make a program play smart like a person.''

To play a decent game of Go, a computer must be endowed with the ability to recognize subtle, complex patterns and to draw on the kind of intuitive knowledge that is the hallmark of human intelligence.

''It may be a hundred years before a computer beats humans at Go -- maybe even longer,'' said Dr. Piet Hut, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and a fan of the game. ''If a reasonably intelligent person learned to play Go, in a few months he could beat all existing computer programs. You don't have to be a Kasparov.''

When or if a computer defeats a human Go champion, it will be a sign that artificial intelligence is truly beginning to become as good as the real thing.

''Go is the highest intellectual game,'' said Dr. Chen Zhixing, a retired chemistry professor at Zhongshan University, in Guangzhou, China.

Dr. Zhixing has spent the last six years perfecting Handtalk, the winner of several recent international competitions. In Go, he said, the mind is dazzled by the beauty of the patterns unfolding on the board, and a sequence of moves can be as mesmerizing as a melody. The trick is to get a computer to compose and understand this visual music.

On its surface, Go seems simple compared with chess. A chess match begins with two facing armies of 16 pieces, ranking from pawn to king, on a 64-square board. Each of the six kinds of pieces is allowed to move only in certain ways -- bishops diagonally; knights in L-shaped paths.

In Go there are few such complications. All of a player's stones are identical. A game begins with a blank 19-by-19 grid (sometimes smaller ones are used), and the two contestants take turns placing their stones (black for one side, white for the other) on any of the unoccupied intersections.

A player can capture a group of an opponent's stones by surrounding it and then removing the cluster from the board. The object of the game is to build complex fence-like structures enclosing as much territory as possible.

''In chess you start with everything you have on the board,'' said Tim Klinger, a graduate student in computer science at New York University who is studying computer Go. ''In Go you start from nothing and build.''

Stone by stone, you try to construct enclaves, engulfing those of your opponent, who is all the time trying to engulf your own. Adding to the complications, there are usually several skirmishes going on simultaneously in different corners of the board. If chess is like a medieval battle, it is sometimes said, Go is more like a world war. And it can be maddeningly difficult to determine who is ahead.

''In chess, if a player loses even a single pawn at world champion level, it can decide the game maybe 99 percent of the time,'' said Dr. Hans Berliner, a computer scientist at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh who is an expert on computer chess. ''In Go, you keep hearing people say that you can lose a life-and-death battle along the edge of the board, but that is far from deciding the outcome. You can go on to other battles. It's a very different kind of game.''

From the point of view of a computer, the difference could not be more profound. Because of the tight constraints in how chess pieces can be moved, a player is faced with an average of only about 35 legal moves to consider with each turn. Computer programs like Deep Blue analyze these moves, considering the opponent's possible countermoves, and then the countermoves to the countermoves. In computer chess terminology, each move and its response is called a ply. The fastest chess programs look ahead seven or eight plies into the game.