Bill Spight / Touch - Discussion

Karl Knechtel: My primary concern with the pages on 'press' and now 'touch' is that they seem to emphasize contact play. This sets a dangerous precedent for pages aimed at the lower kyus...

Charles I'd have to say that my primary concerns are (a) that the titles go against the general policy of having descriptive or defining titles and (b) this kind of lecture format is unsuited to the actual teaching of beginners. Given those, I think what is being said could be misunderstood, and, yes, beginners could be misled.

Dieter The difficulty of the page is debatable and easily adapted. The titles bother me more. "The most useful play in Go" and "Another useful play" ... Next is "Yet another useful play" and "A slightly less useful but still very common play". No I cannot endorse it.

unkx80: I don't like the page title also, because the page title tells nothing. If nobody disagrees, I will rename the pages to Introduction to the 'press' tactic and Introduction to the 'touch' tactic in two days (after 2004 November 28, 13:00 UTC).

Charles I have a different suggestion, at Introduction to the 'tap' tactic / Discussion.

unkx80: No strong preference over which page title, but I don't really think using superlatives is a good idea? But any of the two titles goes for me.

Bill: I avoided naming the plays in the title because of the conflict with the existing Press page. I have no objection to unkx80's (or Charles's) suggestion for renaming. :-)

Later: Please change Attachment to Touch. The attachment is only one form of the touch. Thanks. :-)

Charles Bill, all your examples are of attachments. Don't you think you are overstretching your idea, as it is? This seems to bear no relation at all to anything teachable. If touch is attachment+hane+block and block has some other definition to include atari on a lone stone ... well, this just seems a quite mad bid for generality.

Bill: Actually, Charles, 10 of my examples are attachments (including clamps), 6 are hanes, 3 are blocks, and one is a bulge. You may not like my idea, Charles, but there it is. If I had meant attachment, I would have said that, not invented a synonym for it.

Also, concerning your remark below about the titles' making statements: Upon reflection, I think that unkx80's suggestions, that do not do that, are better. My intention is to provide an introduction to these plays, not to advance a hypothesis about their utility. In fact, with those titles, I will probably alter the text. :-) Please change the titles to those suggested by unkx80. Thanks.

Charles I am just amazed that someone with your years in go can come up with something as dense and hard to parse, label it as 'introductory', and propose it for Pages for Beginners. My suggestions are probably not welcome; but I think the ideas of value here, such as they are, should be disentangled from the wish to be very general and inclusive, and spread over a number of pages. Probably a whole path is required. Rather than wash my hands of the whole business, I would like constructively to engage with the naming and exposition question here. And on the point of the statement - of course what is being said here is a statement of utility of a concept, and of course one should expect the SL community as a whole to be able to chip in. That is what goes on here.

Bill: I welcome your suggestions, Charles. It is your actions that bother me.

Let's have a discussion, fine. But meanwhile, let's have appropriate titles, please.

Charles OK, convince another librarian. I am taking a break from SL for a while.

Bill: OK, Charles. Thanks.

Unkx80 (or someone), please use your titles. I will amend the text afterwards to reflect the changes. Thanks. :-)

unkx80: Done.

Bill: Many thanks. :- ) Tonight I will edit the material in line with the title change and in response to Charles's comments. :-)

Rich: Is it not just a sub-class of the attachment? Perhaps it could be added to attachment and aliased.

Dieter: Charles, "the press is the most useful play in Go" remains controversial. I prefer it to be subpages, like Rich.

Charles Ah - I did it before reading that. On Rich's point: I think we now have a statement, not a term, so we have a separate page and we can discuss the statement there. That seems quite normal to me.

Bill: It's a superclass of attachment and hane and block.