Jan de Wit

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May 24th, 2010: Long time no see, Senseis! I took a long time out from playing Go (probably coincides with getting a job) which probably cost me a few stones, but hopefully a few Bad Habits as well. The good news is that my one of my 'Go-grandchildren' (guys who got introduced to the game by someone I introduced to Go) is now a 3rd Dan! It's Sjoerd Kuperus? in case you heard about him. The other go-grandson is a first kyu and the 'father' is a 3rd kyu by now. Now to get back to 10 kyu myself... First up, however is mending all those broken email links.

It's great to see the site thriving still after all these years, great job Morten and Arno!

March 15th 2003: A short report just in from Nijmegen: it's a lot of fun, nice people, lots of players around my strength. I seem to be holding my own as a 10kyu: first a loss by 7.5 points (I did well in fuseki but made a bad decision in the middle game) then a big win (by way of two very large scale kills) and finally a big loss (messed up in the endgame but I was tired after 7 hours playing ;-) More later...

March 4th 2003: Klasse 40! Whee!

I'll be participating in the Nijmegen tournament ([ext] Dutch announcement) during the weekend of 15th and 16th March. It's not unreasonable to expect I'll be one of the weaker players there, but what the hey!

February 17th 2003: I'm now 11 kyu, and I've decided I ramble too much, so this page will be refactored soon. As will the [ext] http://www.goproblems.com applet; I'm going to use my programming skills on something tangible instead of on a program which will never play as good as I want it to ;-)

What book should I read next?

January 10th 2003: I broke the klasse-50 barrier recently, I'm now *cough*,*cough* a lowest-quarter-double-digit-kyu (that's 14k). Ten stones in two years, I wonder how long I'll be able to keep that up... One of the things that has got me so far (besides SL) is what I like to call Fault Tolerant Play. I'll ramble on on that page.

March 22nd 2002: I recently started visiting the Go Club in Utrecht again, and it seems that I'm now around 15 kyu. Also, I did better than I expected in (the first half of) a lightning Go tournament (15 mins per person), scoring 2 out of 4. I lost two games on time, but would've won if played just a little bit faster. Monday will see the last four games...

January 7th: Uh oh, I'm turning into a full RecentChangesJunkie! One day I'll be a full RecentChangesJunkiesNightmare :-) Too bad I spent (part of) Christmas reading the entire library without being on the lookout for minor mistakes. Oh well, I'll just go through it again.

(November 23rd) : GoZer has been superseded by HaGo.

I'm a Master of Computer Science (with honors, yay!)[1] . I picked up Go about a year ago (16th feb 2001 if I'm not mistaken). I went through a Go for Beginners course at the local (Utrecht, the Netherlands) club - so I figure I'm still 25-30 kyu or something. (IgoWin tells me I'm 10 kyu, if that's anything to go by).

Update (9th April): Yesterday, I won my first 'serious' game at the Go Club Utrecht. Some better players placed me at 'klasse 60' (roughly 20 kyu, I believe) from what they'd seen from my game :-) As an added bonus, an expert player went through the first 80 moves of the game (also videotaped), because there were two students of psychology who wanted to study the interaction between players of different levels. Quite good to learn from...

Update (November 23rd): I never became a fully paid up member of the Utrecht Go Club, but I managed to beat my sensei with 9 stones handicap. Since then I have started the BitonGoClub?, a Go club at my 'studentenvereniging' (fraternity/students association) - we've already got 18 members :-).

Amazing how people can pick up the rules by just watching a game!! Most people are now busy improving their basic skills by playing IgoWin, in anticipation of the next club playing night on January 8th (when we hope to have got approval for buying a real GoBan, in place of the crappy paper and plastic ones we've got now).

Writing an update and a computer program has rekindled my interest in Go and in CombinatorialGameTheory. If anybody happens to know a free Ph.D. position on CGT...

Bill: Why not get in touch with Prof. Berlekamp or Martin Mueller? There is a computers and games conference coming up this summer at the University of Alberta. Martin is one of the sponsors. :-)


Find out a bit more about me and my M.Sc. thesis, which is about providing genericity to the functional programming language [ext] Haskell at [ext] http://www.generic-haskell.org or (very old page) [ext] http://www.students.cs.uu.nl/~jwit/GenericHaskell.html . My thesis is nearly finished, check out the talk I recently gave at [ext] http://www.cs.uu.nl/research/projects/generic-haskell/JanDeWit-Talk.pdf.

Wiki-ing around here also made me feel comfortable enough to add some comments to the [ext] Haskell Wiki. There I can teach something! (But I'll still get overruled by the Knights of the Lambda Calculus :-)


In my free time, I've started programming GoZer, a Go playing thingie in Java. It's currently in a 'playable-with' (as opposed to 'playable-against') state, but I'm going to tack on a random number generator next. And it's in Dutch.

(November 23rd) : GoZer has been superseded by HaGo. Still in Dutch, no longer in Java, reads ladders etcetera. Source code is still in Dutch, though :-)


If you're interested in mailing me, I can be reached at [email] jwit@cs.uu.nl (adres bestaat niet meer ?) or [email] jwit@studenten.net.

If all you want to do is beat or teach me, look for the nickname 'yatima2975' on KGS. I seem to have become 20k there all of a sudden, due to a friendly game I played and lost against a friend. It was a game late at night; we both should have gone to bed hours ago.

But still, I think I'm going to get the game reviewed by the Go Teaching Ladder or by Dieter (seeing his comment on his homepage :-)

(The nickname comes from the great sci-fi novel 'Diaspora' by Greg Egan.)


In the hope that it gets noticed (I don't know where to put it!) and as an experiment, I've started a page on BQM600.


[1] Arno: congratulations :o)


Hey Jan, thanks for the tip about putting links in my UserPreferences. -RussellKhan


My current rating at DGS:

my current Go rating at DGS


Jan de Wit last edited by JanDeWit on May 24, 2010 - 23:20
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