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Charles Matthews
PageType: HomePage    

I'm a BGA 3 dan in Cambridge UK. I write extensively on go for magazines, and on the Web (most of those articles are now on the Gobase site [ext] http://gobase.org). I also write books, one of which is published.

I probably should be writing my stuff for Jan van der Steen instead of contributing to SL - current series of articles is about ko. But now I'm a librarian here I'm probably trapped eternally.

Right now MSO Cambridge [ext] http://www.msocambridge.org.uk is occupying much of my attention. (Now safely over with on May 3-5. The highlight for me was the encounter with the visiting Ugandan team of mancala and draughts players - from Kampala YMCA - and giving them a go teaching session.)


I have quite qwikily become a SL addict. One of my themes is the expansion of the use of English terms. Some of the older books perpetuate the use of Japanese terms, when there are English equivalents that have come into common use.

As part of this I put in work on the joseki nomenclature - expert names. Here a few Japanese terms can help in keeping names within bounds.

Another interest is seen at tenuki joseki pages index. It seems that the whole topic of tenuki joseki tells one something serious about shape, in sabaki situations (i.e. unfavourable conditions).


My online articles are at [ext] http://gobase.org/articles/matthews/ . I have also started to contribute to NRich, which is a mathematics teaching enrichment site. The pieces at

and

may be of interest to anyone coming to go with a strongly mathematical background. Most 'rules' discussion in go has (in my opinion) little to do with effective teaching of the game. Those articles are the beginnings of a bridge.

June 2003: further article

[ext] http://nrich.maths.org.uk/mathsf/journalf/jun03/art1/index.html

has been posted.


I have added quite a large number of short pages with very brief biographies of pro players. My reference for this has been John Fairbairn's comprehensive Names Dictionary. We live in a very interesting time for the internationalisation of go.


Copy-editing is hardly "radical, anarchic" stuff. But there seems to be enough interesting discussion here on SL that house-styling the technical matter is worthwhile, and increases its legibility. I've been: making Black and White the nouns and black, white the adjectives; making references to lettered points a, b and so on; expanding abbreviations. See also SL Conventions.


Preview of my book Shape Up!, written with Seong-june Kim, now at [ext] http://gobase.org/articles/matthews/shape_up - links to PDF file downloads for the Introduction and the first three chapters.

Stefan: Looks interesting. When will the book publish? JG: I would also like to buy it.

Charles: I'll let you know when I know. It isn't so easy to get published.

saccade: Any word on this? The parts you put online have been really useful. I'd be willing to pay for a mailed printout if you can't manage to publish it.

Charles: As I say, I'll let people know.

Is it true you're changing the title to Waiting for Godot? ~ian~

Charles: No. But the interest level of trying to break into go authorship is well up to Sam Beckett's standards.

June 2003: Further samples will be posted, starting with [ext] http://gobase.org/studying/articles/matthews/shape_up/Chapter04.pdf.

phenomene : I have just downloaded the chapter four. Congratulations Charles! You are a brilliant teacher and I will recommend Shape Up! to all the players in my go club.

saccade: Thanks a lot -- so far this book has been brilliant! Is there an address in care of which I can send a letter to you?

Charles My postal address is 60 Glisson Road, Cambridge CB1 2HF, England/UK.

[ext] http://gobase.org/studying/articles/matthews/shape_up/Chapter05.pdf now has Chapter 5.


I intend to post old articles from seven years of the Cambridge tournament booklet at Trigantius Archives.


Someone else added that I'm author of "Teach Yourself Go"; which I can't deny.

nuance: Why would you want to? It was the first book that actually managed to get me to understand the first thing about go beyond the utter basics.

Charles Opinions on my books seem divided. I don't do bland, so perhaps it's not surprising. My reticence is mostly because SL isn't the place for commercial promotion.


I have identified this game from Falkener's book.


Meatball Wiki is a different place from here, with experts on wikis contributing.

Jan: I was intrigued by your remarks there on a Pattern Language for Go. My only experience with the whole pattern business comes from my programming background, so I wonder how those ideas can be applied to Go. Is it something like the catalogue of shapes in Basic Instinct (which looks a bit like the famous Gang of Four book), or am I missing your point entirely?

Charles No, not entirely. It's a bit premature/pretentious to identify the pattern language 'syntax' (this problem in this context, therefore do this) with a high-level approach to go via patterns (suji/haengma/joseki/shape) where knowing the patterns is relatively easy but explaining their correct application is much harder. But there is some common ground there, certainly. And it's part of the standard Japanese approach to anything through kata, so it doesn't feel artificial to a go player. The point would be to try to explain this in an interesting way.


For my contributions to [ext] wikipedia see [ext] http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Charles_Matthews.

Note: the above was added by Frs not me, according to the log. Though there is nothing to be ashamed of there, I'm not posting about go.

While we're on the subject, though, people might like to read this: [ext] http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Most_common_Wikipedia_faux_pas .

We aren't Wikipedia at SL: it would be nice to think of ourselves as sharing some of their ideals, but we have and welcome signed contributions, for example. I would like to encourage SL writers to read that page, though.

Charles Matthews


Yamamoto Samutsu Ikegami Kiyoshi Akiyama Tamigoro Higuchi Tetsuzo



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