Maeda Nobuaki 108 Discussion

  Difficulty: Advanced   Keywords: Life & Death

Eric Osman: This is problem 108 in the intermediate level problems of Maeda Nobuaki 9 Dan's small yellow softcover book published by Slate and Shell.

Dyonn: It's White to move.

[Diagram]
White to Live  

I'll leave some blank lines so you don't see the answer unless you're ready to.


















































The book shows the following answer:

[Diagram]
Book answer  


but I'm wondering if this is also an answer:

[Diagram]
Does this work too ?  


If it doesn't work, then it makes a pretty good "black to play" problem, doesn't it ?

By the way, given that life-and-death problems are supposed to give us practice for real-game situations, and given that real-game situations often have more than one good "next move", why are life-and-death problems in books usually designed to only have one right answer ?

Typed in by Eric Osman


Hans: My first guess was also 1 but it seems as if white is dead.

[Diagram]
White dies?  


or

[Diagram]
Variation 1  


or

[Diagram]
Variaton 2  

8 on 2


Dieter: Eric, if you don't mind, I will change this page title into a BQMxxx or something else more relevant to the content. If you do mind, I'll leave it as it is.

Neil: I'd say that the question of "Why Go problems tend to have only one answer?" fits the title of this page fairly well. The example problem probably should be snipped away and moved to BQM, though, as it distracts from what to me is that very interesting question.

Dieter: OK. I understand this page better now. My answer to the question is what I write in DieterVerhofstadt/Ideas on improvement: tsumego go one step beyond ladders: still one solution, but branches. Next come real game (whole board) problems where there is indeed often more than one answer.

unkx80: While I am not against creativity, too many pages with creative names make information difficult to find. Notice that Charles et al have been standardizing the naming of the joseki pages. So...

Eric Osman: Personally (speaking as the author of this page), I don't care what you actually call the page. As far as I'm concerned, the ease of finding the page relies least on the actual title of the page and more on these other factors:

  • Where is the page advertised. When I create a wiki page, I typically advertise it in rec.games.go and the Massachusetts Go Association email list, and sometimes I send it to the American Go Association e-journal.
  • Is the page pointed to by some relevant places. For instance, the "big question mark" list was mentioned. Pointing to this page from that list will go a long way to making this page more accessible, regardless of what this page is actually called.

And of course I pointed to this page from my own home page within this wiki system.

So rename rename rename (but make sure you don't break the links to this page)

Thanks. Eric Osman

Dieter: I have changed the title and added linkage throughout the page. This should enhance both the coverage of the page as the distance to a random page at SL [1]. Of course you can ask to undo this change. I also propose to split the general discussion "Why do tsumego have only one answer while real games don't seem to have such problems" from the discussion of this particular problem.

[1] Go to the Slate and shell page. You'll see it is referenced by this page. So from that page you have an incentive to jump to this one.

And Eric, be reassured that I highly value your contributions.


Maeda Nobuaki 108 Discussion last edited by Dyonn on September 20, 2008 - 20:14
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