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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.)

More on this: I'm off to Uganda on 6 July, to coach.

9 July: At Kampala YMCA teaching a daily go class.

19 July: After ten four-hour classes in 11 days, the first ever Go tournament in Uganda, a 16-player knockout on 13x13 boards, won by Moses Lukwago, whom I grade as 20 kyu. Also, two mentions in the sports section of The New Vision, the government-owned national daily newspaper.

21 July: I fly home, with another mention in The New Vision.

Photos now posted at [ext] http://gobase.org/information/pictures/?col=uganda .


My email address is charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com. My old address with the Demon ISP will shortly be shut down, though I have been reading it. My old homepage at www.sabaki.demon.co.uk will also go offline in the near future, so I've not been updating it.


As a favour to my brother, a link to his blog [ext] http://www.speakingasaparent.blogspot.com/ .


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.


Minor editing

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.

Now, quite a few months later, the SL mark-up has taken some major steps forward. The site in general has still to catch up with

  • the little-stones mark-up, B1 and so on
  • formatting of diagram titles includes text and link features
  • hyperlinks out of diagram marked points
  • hyperlinks to footnote markers [1], as anchors.

In editing, I've come to some conclusions about upper case:

  • I systematically remove CamelCase (in almost all cases)
  • diagram titles to start (only) with upper case, no full stop
  • page titles mostly to start (only) with upper case (some exceptions for headline purposes, such as Recent Changes).

I edit out most smileys: if they are really needed to prevent misunderstanding, that's as a prop for weak or suspect writing that might need to go, too.

The position on Japanese terms is that many remain (e.g semeai) even in cases where there are good equivalents. Without being fanatical, I'm changing many as I come across them. The standardisation of names for joseki, enclosures, extensions , jumps and so on seems not to have raised many hackles. I think the main concentrations of Japanese usage are now in older pages, which on principle need some edits to bring them into line with current best practice. Quite a number of pages have had the Japanese term moved to alias status.


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

July 2: Chapter 6 at [ext] http://gobase.org/studying/articles/matthews/shape_up/Chapter06.pdf

July 22: [ext] http://gobase.org/studying/articles/matthews/shape_up/Chapter06a.pdf is the first problem set from the book (NB this is a large file of around 600K).

Enough: What program are you using to create those PDFs? I can get it down to 290K with Acrobat 6. Even all the other chapters online I can get about 50% size reduction.

Charles I export from Pagemaker 6.5.

Enough: Ahh. Have you tried InDesign? 2? It's much better IMHO. They have a realatively cheap upgrade for Pagemaker users. We use it at work for online and print magazines. Switched from QuarkXpress? and Pagemaker.


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


Short (irrelevant?) question on Go stones

I was looking at the Go pictures from the YMCA camps. The go boards seem made from parchment in some cases and the stones look really nice. I was wondering where you obtained the stones from. I am on the lookout for nice looking, inexpensive stones. A couple of us here in Ohio are thinking of making our own board & a small club, but didn't know what to do about stones. Short of using a lathe on a wooden staff, which was the only idea we came up with!

Charles The equipment was bought through BGA Books; the plastic stones are the Payday brand, the boards are mats that I think come originally from Czechia.

The font layout of your book is really nice, it reminded me of TeX. After reading Kageyama though I found myself wishing that the diagrams had more panache to them. Perhaps there is something to recommend a severe black and white, dark lines diagram, but I would think that making the lines lighter gray would enhance the relationship of the stones to one another.

Charles I use the gofigs diagram software, with some Postscript fonts, in a template specified for the 'Teach Yourself' series.

Cheers .. Nandan


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.