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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.

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.com/ .

I probably should be writing my stuff instead of contributing to SL. But now I'm a librarian here I'm probably trapped eternally.


Online preview of my book Shape Up!,

written with Seong-june Kim? - there are links to PDF file downloads for the Introduction, the first eight chapters, and a problem set

23 October 2003

Second problem set posted.

8 October 2003

Chapter 9 posted at Gobase.

24 September 2003

Chapter 8 is posted today at Gobase. See

[ext] http://gobase.org/studying/articles/matthews/shape_up/

for all of the ten parts now published.

Older comments:

Rich: Thanks again, Charles; this is definitely set to be a classic go book. Section 7.3 especially was like a gift from above. Great stuff.

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.

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!

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.

Vlad?: It is a very interesting and good book! Thanks!

I have a question about one diagram: on the first page of chapter 8, the sequence leading to a ko when white cuts through the attach-and-extend joseki. Aren't moves B6 and B8 better kept as ko threats? I remember seeing this in another book, but can't remember which one.

Charles You can find slightly different versions of this 'joseki' in various books, I know.


Summer 2003

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 .


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.


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


Neil Hello there. Thank you for the answer to my question on my home page. I hope we can settle things down and not get defensive. Arno's words didn't come off to me the way they were intended, clearly, and we're already resolving it via e-mail. Let's drop the defensive postures, all of us.

Charles Well now - 'defensive' is what any wiki gets in the face of unacceptable behaviour. You can easily get banned for what you've done already today. I'd have no compunction.

Neil Do whatever you want. I tried to smooth things, but you clearly aren't interested in that. So I shall just ignore you.


Klaus: Hi Charles!

I started to read your posted versions of [Shape up!], and I enjoyed it very much. (I'd like to get a copy, as soon as it is printed.) Congratulation! Would you mind if I start a page on some examples out of the manuscript? There are questions I have, and possible further explanations that double digit kyu players visiting Sensei's Library might find useful. May I ?

Charles Please understand the copyright position. The postings at Gobase are copyright. Anything you post here is published under the Open Content License. If I agree, I lose copyright (with my co-author). That makes it harder to get published in the end.

So, the two things you ask are somewhat incompatible. In any case, I don't think it is good for SL to have diagrams taken directly from books.

What I'm happy with, is that anyone should post positions here, for comparison - for example from their own games. That way, there can develop here some extra discussion, to support the book.

Klaus: I certainly understand that! I wish, that you'll finish and find someone to publish the book soon! I will search for a good example out of my games in order to post my primary consern.

StormCrow: The OCL is just a license, not any form of copyright release or transfer. Nothing in it prohibits the original author from publishing the material elsewhere under different terms.

Charles Page at SL copyright explains the position.

By submitting material to Sensei's Library you grant everyone the rights to copy, distribute, and modify the material under the terms of the Open Content License.

That's the third paragraph. Well, I decline to give up my rights in the book in that way.

StormCrow: I certainly understand that position, just trying to point out that it doesn't preclude you doing something else (like putting it in a book) with material you write as well.

Charles The main problem is getting a publisher who will get it to the printer's. Why should I create any further question marks over the manuscript? And why should I actually license anyone else to circulate a mangled form?

StormCrow: I certainly appreciate the concerns about getting publication. I just wanted to point out the posting stuff here wouldn't preclude also publishing it elsewhere. I make no value judgements on your desire to not do so. There are benefits both to posting the material here (more discussion) and not posting it here (more control, "possibly" easier to get published/paid later). Do as you wish, I'm not advocating either position.


SnotNose: Thanks for your edits on the new taisha-related pages I began. Thanks also for your patience with my misplacement of material. I learn a lot by trying to put it together for an audience and it is something I'm likely to try to do in the future. Hopefully I won't repeat the mistakes I made this first few times, but I wouldn't count on it! :) All in good faith, though, as I hope you trust.



This is a copy of the living page "Charles Matthews" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2004 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.