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Temperature

 

Temperature and Terminology Discussion
   

This page is for discussion of temperature and related terms, such as urgency, miai value, and deiri value. If you are interested, please join in. :-)

Bill: Brief comment to kick things off.
When people talk about the sizes of plays, they seem to naturally think of them as indicating gain and loss, and to derive gains and losses by adding and subtracting them. That is, they want miai values, but they have learned deiri values. They try to use deiri values like miai values, and end up with confusion. (See Discussion of the value of sente and gote plays for an example of this.)
So I have been on a campaign to promote miai values. That has meant introducing the term, as well as the term, deiri value, for what people have already learned. Whether I have caused more confusion than I have cleared up is another question. ;-)
The discussion on English vs. Japanese go terminology has got me thinking, though. Temperature is a precise English term that conveys the correct meaning. Maybe we should not bother with miai value at all.

Charles Matthews People are surely interested in the idea of gain first and foremost. Motivation to count plays is, for pragmatic players rather theorists, that if you can count better you will gain something by it, and so win more games.

So the introductory concept might have to be this: it is rare to get a pure gain in competent play.

There are really only two types of 'pure gain' play: a double sente, and the final play of the game. Those don't happen that often. What is called tedomari may resemble the final play of the game.

For other types of gains you give your opponent sente, at least once and possibly more often.[1]

Of course you may succeed in killing the opponent's group without any compensation - you hardly have to count to see the gain, there. You do, however, have to expect to lose sente in so doing (death in gote is horrible because that's then not true).

There is more than one way of dealing with the idea that you must set, against a gain you can see, the value of the sente you have lost in taking it. The naive way is to reckon in the opponent's next play. I make a 25 point gote play, she makes a 20 point gote play, I have sente back having gained 5 points.[3] Of course it's not quite the 'same' sente: it matters quite a lot whether the largest gote play on the board is then worth 18 or 12.[2]

I think the theoretical way of doing this, at a more sophisticated level, by introducing an 'intensive quantity' method of counting per play invested (miai counting), and a background number for the 'value of sente' (temperature, in the guise of ambient temperature), does work. If it is presented correctly, one can see it as

  1. drawing attention that gain must be 'value for money' for the extra stones (balance of past tenuki plays in that part of the board included); and
  2. admitting that go is a war fought on several fronts.

That is, miai counting matches the first point, and temperature the second.


[1] Well, not for example in the case of mochikomi, loss-making threats and so on; but these are notoriously bad play. Sente gains nothing, in the sense that sente plays are one side's prerogative and get counted into the overall 'state of the game'.

[2] The rule of thumb being that if the largest gote play remaining is worth n points deiri, starting the endgame is worth n/2, i.e. the miai value of the largest play left. This may be why Bill thinks we could elide the miai counting concept entirely. But I don't agree. A better name would help: 'point density'?

Bill: Actually, it's worth N/4, half the miai value, which is the same as the temperature.

[3] Bill: And, in terms of what they intend, they are probably using deiri counting, and so their gain is only 2.5 points. If you are 4 points behind and then you make a 25 point move (deiri) and your opponent makes a 20 point move (deiri), you are not 1 point ahead, you are still behind by 1.5 points.

Charles Ah yes, point taken, because the 'swing' in deiri isn't taken from the mid-point, but between 'Black plays' and 'White plays'.


This is a copy of the living page "Temperature and Terminology Discussion" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2003 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.