Parallel ladders / Discussion

Rename Parallel ladders -> Alternative ladders?

Bill: The point of the page is a choice of ladders. In the example given, they happen to be parallel. In more complex examples, they do not have to be.

(Later.) The imminent restructuring/WME will sort this out, I trust.

unkx80: New name accepted.

Bill: Very nice restructuring of this material, unkx80. Many thanks. :-)

(Discussion moved from main page)

Spiral ladder named "parallel ladders" moved to turnaround ladder example 3.

In my parlance the "parallel ladders" means only the pattern in the previous diagram. If this is common (please comment), maybe the beginning of the page would feel more at home on a page called "choosing the correct ladder"? --Bass, 2007-08-11

Bill: I do not think that Dieter (the original author and author of the page title) intended parallel ladders to be a go term, just two ladders that are parallel. In his example, the ladders are different options. I would be happy with a page titled as you suggest. (I have requested a title change for this page to Alternative Ladders. OC, that was before you posted your example.) And FWIW, I would consider your example to be a single ladder. <shrug> But I see how you might count it as two. :-)

unkx80: I think Charles is one of the original authors too, because he signed it. Later some people commented that the example was not good, so I attempted to produce another example.

By the way, Bass's ladder was what the Magic of Go referred to as double ladder, if I interpreted that article correctly. Also, Bass's ladder might be a spiral ladder?

blubb: By "parallel ladders", the single kind of position that naturally comes to my mind is comprised of two or more interlocked ladders running concurrently in the same direction. Some nice examples are shown at Intertwined Ladders.

unkx80: Bill, "alternative ladders" sounds good, except that I am first reminded of double threat ladder maker. I guess I need a while to think of how all these double ladder related pages should be WME'd. A problem is that googling around doesn't seem to give conclusive results as to how these terms are used.

Bill: Yes, I think there is no consensus, at least in English, about what to call these things. Maybe some total restructuring is called for. Chinese seems to have a much richer terminology than either Japanese or English --I don't know about Korean--, so the Chinese terminology may offer a good classification scheme to structure these pages around.

BTW, one topic about ladders we have not dealt with much has to do with these stones or small groups of stones that you sometimes see in problems involving ladders, which change their direction or offer alternatives. John Tromp has written a paper about the formal computational difficulty of reading ladders, based upon such formations of stones. It's worth at least a reference, I think.