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Where Is Go Going
   

AvatarDJFlux

Dear all, I'd just like to share some thoughts and feelings that I've been munching in my head lately. I'd be very glad to hear your opinions and criticisms, of course.

I started to play go in the early eighties, giving up chess in the meanwhile: it looked to me as if the latter was becoming too cramped, almost claustrophobic.

Two aspects of go I loved most (and still do): on the one hand, its subtlety, deepness and stress on flexibility and on keeping open as much and as long as possible the largest number of possibilities.
It really fascinates me how professionals use yosu-miru and probes in order to force your opponent to choose a strategy, making him as a consequence lose some degrees of freedom, so to speak.

In the eighties, if I remember correctly, very few professionals played long, complicated and drawn out joseki's: Cho Chikun once said that he didn't like them because they simplified the game too much, taking away subtlety. Kobayashi was criticised very often by his fellow professionals (especially Takemiya...) for settling the shape as much as he could.

On the other hand, I adore the great role played by intuition and "feeling" (something that I couldn't find in chess). I'm not saying that brute force reading and calculation are not important, especially so when you go through chuban to yose, but in fuseki and early chuban intuition has wide scope for action: no fuseki is like another one (not so in chess...). Not for anything my heroes are Shuko, Takemiya and Otake!

It is true that intuition and feeling can be seen as skills that one acquires with the experience, playing and studying literally thousands of games.

(Mind you, I am a post-hippy, my generation is the one that looked toward India and the "Orient" at large to find something that we couldn't find in our western, rational mind. So it is quite obvious that I would cherish these aspects of the game of go, maybe missing or misunderstanding some others.)

Then I stopped playing for ten years, and when I resumed a couple of years ago, what kind of situation did I find (and please correct me if I'm wrong)?

In the East, the coming up of strong, very strong Korean and Chinese players: this is really great, as otherwise the game could have ended up as something for a few pro and for a bunch of aged people in Japan... But this meant also, as I perceive it, the affirmation of a very aggressive style right from the beginning, and the appearance of almost established fuseki sequences where long, complicated, drawn-out joseki's are instrumentally played in order to settle the shape quickly and go directly to a sort of o-yose stage, where it's easier to calculate the value of moves.
Is go evolving toward chess??!? ;-) What happened to subtlety and flexibility?

In the West, there are a number of attempts to formalise the game using game theory and other mathematical and logic tools. One of the reasons for this is of course the possibility to arrive at writing a software that would be able to play at a reasonable level, but we have seen little result so far. Luckily, I say.
I think the real reason is the very western passion for rational and formal thinking, for putting everything in the right box identified with its proper label.
It almost looks as if people are trying to find the perfect move in the fuseki by applying some suitable theorem instead of relying on experience and "feeling", as described above.
Is the western, rational mind taking over??!? ;-) What happened to intuition?
Are there any pro who use such approach??!?
Another aspect that seems weird to me is the hugely large discussion going on on how to write a perfectly coherent and logic set of rules and definitions, able to take into account even the remotest and weirdest of the possibilities. (Ah, Gödel, where art thou... ;-)

Couldn't all the energies spent in these intellectual quests be spent instead on playing and spreading the game? It seems to me that all that mathematical, logical and theoretical arguing would scare any beginner (not to mention myself), making him/her believe that without a PhD in mathematics you cannot play go: not a good advertising indeed!

I'm not saying that those approaches to the game have no validity (and after all I'm still 3k and shouldn't talk much...).
Koreans and Chinese players seem to win more international tournaments then the Japanese do.
Intellectual formalisation is surely fun for those who practise it.
But I have the sensation that such approaches somehow diminish and simplify the game, an attitude that is only natural when one is afraid of empty spaces (agoraphobia) and wants to grasp a sure way around...
I, of course, have no answers, and perhaps I just like to grope in wide darkness...

Now I await your criticisms and opinions.
But I promise: while still liking better to develop the left side of my brain, I will practise reading and counting as well, otherwise I'm afraid I'll never reach shodan...


HolIgor: I am not strong enough to judge about the trends in modern professional go, but I know that there is one big difference between go and chess. Chess suffocates in draws and go does not. I rememeber that when I read the rules for the first time I was amazed by the absence of draws. It seemed to me a very unjust thing. Imagine, you work hard, you play good, not worse than your opponent and in the end everything is decided by the last ko.

Today I lost a game by a half point again. I won a lot of games by a half point. It is a lottery.

I imagine that playing against Yi Chang-ho many players would agree to a lottery. Yi Chang-ho would not, of course. This is a matter of strength and weakness.

Freedom is a strange thing. According to Marx it is recognized necessity. At some point I understood that I can't win making any moves. I have to make correct moves. This point in the games moves closer and closer to the opening, to fuseki. But it is still very far. At move 50 or so. Recently I discovered importance of turning first. Playing with it now. I admire the way dan players discuss the moves in the fuseki. I have no clue. I call it divination. How much will the opponent be able to get by attacking my weak group? Recently I discoved that a line of ikken-tobi has a good fighting and eye forming potential. But to what extent?

I've heard that pros study fuseki to yose now. But at the same time somebody in the rgg tried to find in a database the longest fuseki sequence common for more than 3 games. I don't remember the size of the database, but it was not small. The longest line was 6 moves. It is really unbelievable.

Arno: 6 moves? Maybe they were not counting for "normalizing" the board, i.e. the first B move on 4-4 would be a different game than the first B move on 16-16. If you normalize the board (mirror and/or turn around) you get something like my fuseki_db at [ext] http://xmp.net/arno/fuseki.html -- a quick look showed a sequence up to move 20 with 3 games being the same (black low chinese fuseki against white ni-ren-sei). Base: roughly 2000 games.
DaveSigaty: Alternatively from the Go Games on Disk CD (January 2002 update) the following is the "widest path" (following the most frequent first move and the most frequent reply to that move...). The population analyzed for the game counts shown consists of the 1470 games from 2000 and 2001 out of which W won 667, B won 800, and 3 were drawn or void. The analysis ignores mirrored moves since my machine is too slow on the searches :-)

[Diagram]
Diag.: "Widest Path" Fuseki 1-10

B 1 - 1056 games: W won 470 and B won 586

W 2 - 564 games: W won 249 and B won 315

B 3 - 257 games: W won 106 and B won 151

W 4 - 124 games: W won 51 and B won 73

B 5 - 98 games: W won 40 and B won 58

W 6 - 53 games: W won 25 and B won 28 (notice how W suddenly narrows the gap in results!)

B 7 - 46 games: W won 21 and B won 25

W 8 - 46 games: W won 21 and B won 25

B 9 - 46 games: W won 21 and B won 25

W 10 - 26 games: W won 14 and B won 12


[Diagram]
Diag.: "Widest Path" Fuseki 11-15

B 11 - 26 games: W won 14 and B won 12

W 12 - 26 games: W won 14 and B won 12

B 13 - 13 games: W won 7 and B won 6

W 14 - 13 games: W won 7 and B won 6

B 15 - 8 games: W won 4 and B won 4

There are a couple of interesting points here (based in part on some further analysis of the data on the CD). The reference point is W 10 where the winning percentage for W exceeds that for B:

  • The sequence with W 10 first appeared in 1997 (checking back only to 1990, it may have appeared even earlier) in the 2nd Samsung Cup final between Yi Ch'ang-ho (B) and Kobayashi Satoru.
  • Despite the fact that W 10 seems to have been invented by a Japanese pro, only 1 game featuring this move was from a Japanese domestic tournament (Inori Yoko vs. Kobayashi Izumi in the Women's Honinbo in 1999). All others are from Chinese, Korean, or international tournaments. Is this an indication of the greater extent of fuseki research going on in China and Korea compared to Japan?
  • W 10 appeared as follows by year:
    • 1997 - 1 game
    • 1998 - 1 game
    • 1999 - 4 games
    • 2000 - 15 games
    • 2001 - 11 games (last appeared in July). Does this indicate that the pros have reached their conclusions concerning this line and moved on to other ideas during the last 6 months? This may be so. The move that may have killed this line is B 'a' instead of 13. This was first played in February 2000 in a game between Cho Hun-hyeon (B) and Yu Bin in the LG Cup. That game was won by W. The move was not used again until May 2001 when Yu Ch'ang-hyeok played it in the Chunlan Cup against Wang Lei. In June Yu used the move again and won again. Finally in July Ch'oe Myeong-hun won as B with the move and suddenly the pros were no longer interested in this line.

--Stefan: Fascinating! I knew that pros (especially in Korea) spend a very, very large amount of time on research, and I knew that there were certain preferred fuseki at any given point in time. But I didn't know the phases in fuseki fashion were as fast or frequent as this evidence seems to indicate.


HolIgor: It seems that the process that AvatarDX mentions is really underway. It is a natural thing though. White did well with the position after move 10 so, the variation was popular. Then black comes with a new move and starts to win more than lose. Naturally nobody wants to continue it for white till somebody comes with a new idea for white countering black's move at 'a'. It is natural that the professinals study what other people play and rememeber the result. This is like the situation with chess, but it seems to me that this is not a new thing under the moon. In the era when everybody played Shusaku joseki the move sequences were long too. They were much more difficult to collect and analize though. With computer databases every pro can actually see statistics of any variation to the moment where the game really starts.

In go the choice of the moves in fuseki is wider than is chess, of course, and the variations should be shorter, but still they would be there. The actual game would happen in the chuuban and yose, while there would be quite decent amount of openings to use.

I would use this approach as I did not develop that fuseki intuition and play first 20-30 moves just scatterign stones on the board trying to avoid situations that I know would be unpleasant for me.


Dieter: I'd like to react to one statement in AvatarDJFlux's highly interesting post. Couldn't all the energies spent in these intellectual quests be spent instead on playing and spreading the game?

As with all cultural and intellectual features, the quest for perfect play or formalization does not necessarily harm spreading and enjoying the game. I've been teaching math for a week now to 13-year olds. The methods used in the textbook are highly intuitive at the expense of logical reasoning and proof. The kids adore it. Meanwhile, others continue to formalize math at a very high level, or explore the extremities of the well known paths.

Learning the basics and exploring the limits are the opposite ends of the intellectual process. There is little reason to mix them up - although refreshing the basics does good to every explorer.



This is a copy of the living page "Where Is Go Going" at Sensei's Library.
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