Coffee Machine
Taking a break? Go ahead and add what's on your mind right now. Alternatively, take a look at some go humour, fun go facts, or great quotes.
N.B. If continuing a thread, add your remarks to the end, even if in a previous month. If starting a new thread, add it at the end of the current month; if that month is not yet present add it at the top of the page.
| Table of contents | Table of diagrams [Graded go problems for beginners], vol 3, problem 254, black to play |
Motto for today:
fool (2023-04-05): This is a go proverb .. right? Well, I threw out the previous motto, it was getting really old. And when did someone last washed the coffee pot??
(You may change the motto of the day, but please save the old motto in Old Mottos.)
July 2024
Spam
unkx80: In recent days I removed several instances of forum spam with "Breaking News" as its title. These spam posts aim to gain subscribers for a major news organization in the USA.
If personnel from this news organization have to resort to such spam tactics to gain subscribers, then their actions only serve to damage the reputation of the news organization itself.
Question about calling tsumego unsound
Malcolm A few days ago I asked a question on the talk page for tsumego about about calling tsumego unsound. So far there has only been one response, from unkx80. I would appreciate a few other responses, particularly from SL librarians. I think it's an issue that merits some attention. By the way I mentioned this topic on ![[ext]](images/extlink.gif)
a forum and got two responses there. John Fairburn's comments are particularly interesting I think.
hnishy: I borrowed "unsound" from chess. A chess problem is called unsound when it has more than one solution or no solutions. The concept is quite similar to 失題 in Japanese.
unkx80: I see, thanks.
Slightly off-topic here, but I do think that the concept of 失題 deserves a page on SL. While controversial in the English speaking world, this concept nevertheless exists and is practiced by a significant proportion of Go players.
Question: Is 失題 pronounced in Japanese as しつだい? hnishy:yes, correct.
Dieter: I noticed the discussion on L19. I agree that "unsound" to an English speaker (I'm non-native but at least professionally proficient) comes across as if there is an issue with a problem having multiple equivalent solutions. In 30 years of playing and discussing Go, I haven't seen such a qualification. Quite the contrary, problems with multiple solutions, fully or almost equivalent, abound and are neither educationally troublesome, nor considered lacking elegance. I would therefore not give them the "unsound" label.
unkx80: My experience has been different. I started learning Go in 1989, and within several years I already came across the term 失题 (shi1 ti2) via Chinese language Go books, can't remember which though. In the early 1990s, English language media on Go was almost non-existent for me.
As further evidence on the term 失题, lets look back to 2006 when somebody created the Igo Hatsuyo-ron Problems page by transcribing the problem diagrams from an online Chinese document, this document still exists today. In this document, there are 18 mentions of 失题 in the problem descriptions, for which some reference the no-solution sense but others referencing the multiple solution sense. Where a problem has been modified in a later edition of Igo Hatsuyo-ron, the mention of 失题 may refer to the original problem, the modified problem, or both. Clearly, based on the problem descriptions, there has been attempts by people at fixing problem compositions that were 失题, although not all of these efforts were successful.
DudleyMoore: I'm not really a chess problem solver, but in chess an unsound combination is a sequence of moves that doesn't work as envisaged. Black tries to force mate, but he missed White's refutation. I wouldn't use it in chess problems, I'd prefer invalid or flawed. However I did find some examples of unsound being used on chess.com for chess problems/studies.
hnishy: Shitsudai article has been created by unkx80, with some additions by me. Coffee Machine is not prohibited to be productive. :)
Malcolm: That's a really good page! Well done! Minor comment, it could do with a CJK box.
Moving forward, I would prefer if in the future we progressively move the comment about a tsumego being defective / 失题 away from the problem page, towards the solution page. It would be good to have a consensus first however about this. Who says aye?
xela: I mostly agree that it would be good to move "defective" to the solution page. Especially for collections such as Xuanxuan Qijing and Guanzi Pu where John Fairbairn is telling us that the multiple options are by design, not to be considered a flaw. And I think it's legitimate to have "real game situation" problems: in a real game, sometimes there isn't a clear and unique best move. But for things like beginner exercises, or composed tsumego that are intended to follow modern conventions: if it appears that the extra solution is unintended, and it's in a context where people might reasonably expect the solution to be unique, then I don't object to noting the multiple solutions on the problem page.
Malcolm: I entirely agree with you xela.
Malcolm: I propose that rather than calling it defective or some other single-word term, we simply copy/paste a phrase like "this problem has more than one solution" or something along those lines. Or how about "this problem has more than one solution (shitsudai)"?
hnishy: I support Malcolm's proposal with the link to Shitsudai article for wordings. I just borrowed "unsound" from chess for lack of a better word. If Shitsudai is accepted as a loanword from Japanese, I have no objections. But the label should be on the problem page for internal consistency - our tsumego conventions page says "they often include the following... in composed problems, there is only one main line".
Malcolm: Regarding internal consistency, I don't think we need to decide about the label placement solely based on what's currently in the tsumego conventions page - I think that would doing things the wrong way round. We should first decide what we want, and then if a change is needed to tsumego conventions, it can be made. (In any case tsumego conventions needs an edit now to mention shitsudai.)
xela: I agree. Conventions on SL are not handed down on stone tablets. They were created by users, and can be changed by consensus amongst users.
hnishy: As I understand, classic problems on SL are mainly for training, not for history. For example, poetic problem titles are often omitted and no one complains, because they are not important for training purposes. So it's more practical to treat them like modern composed problems - it's bothersome to have multiple different conventions on SL.
Let's look at the big picture: the world of chess, which is larger and more advanced than Go, follows the one-solution principle. So does Asian Go. Only some in non-Asian Go, by far the smallest (and unfortunately the weakest) group of the three, claim the principle is not necessary. Are they right, or just unaware of their room for improvement? Why you stick to the pre-modern Chinese convention when the Chinese themselves describe some classical problems as shitsudai? They have advanced to the modern way in the 20th century. If the English Go community didn't know the one-solution principle, introduce it now. Why you decline to advance and catch up?
xela: Chess is a very different culture. They have a long history of problems as purely artistic compositions: the majority of chess problems are highly artificial and not intended for improving playing skill, to the extent that grandmaster of composing or solving problems is a separate title from grandmaster of playing chess. In recent years we've started to see some more practical problem collections appearing in both books and online, but this is a fairly recent phenomenon. Twenty years ago, people learning chess were discouraged from spending time solving problems (with the exception of endgame studies for more advanced students).
When you are solving problems to improve your play: in a real game, sometimes there is a unique best move, and sometimes there are two equally valid moves (as far as we can tell on current knowledge) where the choice is purely a matter of style. (Or for some life and death situations, the best choice might depend on the rest of the board.) It's good to learn to tell the difference. Therefore it's useful to train on some problems with a unique solution and some problems with multiple solutions. Especially for people who've come through an education system that emphasises asking questions ahead of rote learning.
I think SL serves the needs of both training and history. The lack of poetic titles is just because of the lack of a non-copyrighted English source. If we added titles to all of the Xuanxuan Qijing by copying from Gateway to all Marvels, I think John Fairbairn would not be pleased. I for one would like to see the original titles added if possible.
I'm amused that "advance and catch up" means the same as "follow the conventions established a century ago"!
unkx80: A couple of comments:
- I can accept the consensus approach suggested by xela and Malcolm, although I have no strong preference.
- Here and over at L19, some of the westerners seem to be ignorant of the very presence of shitsudai, or they pretend that shitsudai never existed and denounce it totally. I agree with much of John Fairbairn's comments, but frankly I am also disappointed in some parts of his comments, because I thought that he knew Japanese Go much better than I do. As I understood that shitsudai is a very deeply entrenched concept among a subset of Go players and it has a very long history, what I will defend is the very presence of shitsudai itself. But this is about as far as what I will defend.
- Personally I don't agree with the application of shitsudai to every single problem. There's value in having problems with only one solution, there's value in having problems with multiple solutions, and there's value in both stating or not stating whether a problem has one or multiple solutions. There are practical use cases for all of them. Similar to some of John Fairbairn's comments, hnishy's paragraph including "Why you decline to advance and catch up?" rattles me quite a bit. I do not think that sticking to the one-solution principle for every composed problem is the correct approach.
- Regarding the appropriate English term to use for shitsudai or whether to stick to the romanized form of the Japanese term, I have no preference. But in the spirit of SL, there should be consensus on the English term, if one is to be applied.
hnishy: I give up. If some of you insist on moving the label to Solution pages, proceed at your own risk and cost of time. Presenting multi-solution problems without caution will frustrate many readers, slow down their improvement and invite more questions. You are responsible, not me. How can multi-solution problems be instructive without the label? The reader will click on [/Solution] after finding one of its solutions, without comparing alternatives.
xela: Purely by chance, I stumbled across this today.
![[Diagram]](diagrams/23/755c93386ed8661a752acbe38b0c45c9.png)
The text under the diagram is just "Problem 254 (5 moves). How can Black kill White?" You have to turn to the back of the book to find an answer diagram with the 2-2 point as "the" solution, followed by a "reference" diagram showing two other ways to kill and saying "but the standard attacking move is Black 1 in the correct answer." Of course I don't know whether the text is from Kano Yoshinori himself, a ghostwriter or a translator. From memory, I think there's a handful of similar problems (multiple ways to kill or live, but one way identified as preferred) in this set of books.
Dieter: Hi hnishy. You're coming across one of the aspects of wiki-editing, which is that the collaboration causes friction because there's disagreement on how to proceed. It's fine to "give up" on this particular discussion in this case, just know your efforts in general are very much appreciated.
On the case at hand, I think a label "multi-solution" would cause less friction than "defective". The former is factual, the latter is judgmental. Myself, I'm of the school where a problem should contain minimal hints. The objective is not so much to get it right, as to read into it. But that's my opinion.
March 2024
bugcat: From now on, anyone who behaves in a grossly rude way will immediately receive a 36 hour IP range ban. If another admin wants to revert that, it's their business. It's just a shame we don't have anything longer. This is not RGG; SL is a civil community.
Article blankings will be considered rudeness and incur a ban. If you want to add a remove tag, put it on with your reasoning but don't delete the article's content. Even open a discussion thread if you want.
If other admins disagree with my approach, so be it, but for me this has gone too far.
xela: The above is bugcat's personal view, not an official policy on this site. I agree with this much: if you've ignored warnings and annoyed bugcat enough to get yourself banned, then you're unlikely to get much sympathy from the other librarians or admins. But on the whole, I hope we can welcome new editors, and be tolerant of small mistakes while people are learning. People are generally pretty friendly around here.
2a02:0587:3241:4b00: what community? a bunch of people is not a community. sense ceased being common here a long time ago.
unkx80: Unilateral removal of a substantial amount of content (or all content) from a page is considered vandalism. Vandals, especially persistent ones, are subject to blocks by librarians, of which I am one.
Dieter: while unsigned derogatory remarks, the refusal to identify oneself and operating from different IP adresses won't result into being blocked, they're not a sign of good faith, or common sense, for that matter.
2a02:0587:3241:4b00 you saw who spoke at the perl discuss page. the fact that their identities are known did not stop them from behaving, repeatedly, in a provocative manner. the people that have been here for so many years are the ones who are not 100% rational. and, just because they have been here for years, it does not mean that they are saints. it also does not mean that they are superior than the anonymous people at everything.
DudleyMoore: A wiki has to be edited in co-operation with others, in an atmosphere of respect. Insulting other users because they don't agree with you is not how it works. You resolve disagreement with conversation, not by ignoring the others and calling them dickheads.
no one ignored you and no one called you dickheads. i did not see any willingness to cooperate, and you disagree because you are believers. gods, trolls, and fairies do not exist. you did not earn respect because you reverted edits blindly and because you edited pages for zero good reasons. stop provoking people and ask questions to learn and to understand why all of you are completely mistaken and deluded. P.S.: this should remind you what the goal is:
DudleyMoore : My point was that you didn't attempt to resolve the conflict. Regarding pages like Perl or Python. I think that they could better be moved to subpages of Programming. It is not unreasonable to expect that a page describing the usage of Python or Perl being of interest to a newcomer to Go who might be looking for some inspiration for their hobby language. Insulting other users is not the an attempt to resolve the conflict. A wiki does on thrive on conflict.
July 2023
Dear 2.87.81.68. You make all your edits, including blanking articles and requesting their deletion, removing tags and information, and changing presentation formats, without describing what action you've taken, explaining your reasoning or notifying other editors and soliciting discussion with them.
It's importance to the maintenance of a community-driven site that viewers and editors are given a clear idea of what work is taking place and why, and are provided the opportunity to enter conversation on the topic.
Please begin using communication tools such as:
- edit summaries
- talk pages
- footnotes
- discussion threads
- the Coffee Machine
- an editor homepage
Although your contributions that are constructive are valued, Sensei's Library is not the isolated project of a single person. It's beneficial for other members to be consulted and informed.
Thank you again for any improvements carried out.
-- bugcat, SL admin
June 2023
bugcat: I notice there's disagreement over whether the Clubs & Places tag covers national associations. What do you all think?
one solution is to create an 'Associations, Clubs, Federations & Societies' page with the 'Index page' keyword. it will have links to 4 pages or subpages: 'Associations', 'Clubs', 'Federations', and 'Societies', and a 'See also:' section for everything else that is not one of the above (for example, 'Centers/Centres'). the 'Clubs & Places' keyword can then be removed, or it can be renamed to 'Legal entity'.
March 2023
fool: I don't suppose anyone drinks tea here?
xela: Not here, no, it's a coffee machine. But at home, yes, I drink tea. Malcolm Indeed, time for a cuppa
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