emeraldemon: Old Urgency Page (2007-08-22 17:12) [#3831]

Here's the content from "Urgency", if anyone feels there's something important missing. After looking at it, I think most of what's explained here is already covered in "Urgent Point".

Urgency is an informal go concept, as in the proverb about urgent points. The urgency of a play is supposed to give a correct idea of the priority to give it.

In Go theory, an urgent play usually refers to a move that stabilizes an important group. Consequently, attacking an unstable important group is also called urgent. The importance of a group is decided by its size and its impact on surrounding areas or groups.

In contrast, a big play refers to a move which develops a large open area.

Clearly,the difference between urgent and big is on the surface only. When looking at plays from the perspective of "living stones" as a game objective (somewhat incorrectly labeled as Chinese counting) you can see why an urgent play is actually big.

anonymous: Note: This page is opinion.

Andy Pierce: And wrong opinion, in my opinion. :) I would define "urgent" as a single move, the only move on the board, that has a huge influence on the entire game, that must be played right now. In contrast, there can be several big moves available and a player can select between them as they desire. I've never heard of two urgent moves being miai, but this is common for big points. In the literature I've read, urgent moves usually refer to moves that make shape, rather than moves that stabilize a group, which I sometimes see described as honte. I wouldn't say that slow or slack have anything to do with urgency, but are more related to the concept of big. A person making a move that is slow or slack has made a poor choice. A person that misses an urgent point has totally failed to understand the game position (so it's much worse to miss an urgent point than to make a slack move). Just (yet another possibly wrong) opinion. Feel free to WME at will.

xela: The problem with such a strict definition of "urgent" is that the question "which point is more urgent" becomes meaningless. You might say that a good player would never miss an urgent point, so it not possible for there to be two urgent points at the same time--but I think this is not true for many of us amateurs. To me, "stabilising a group" and "making shape" overlap to a great extent--but that is just yet another opinion (like much of this site). I don't have a problem with pages being "opinion", since Ultimate Truth is so hard to come by in go.

The text above contains plenty of qualifiers ("informal", "usually", "on the surface"). I don't think the page in its current state is in danger of misleading anybody. I'd prefer to leave it as is (now that I've just deleted the possibly controversial equation of "non-urgent" and "slow"), and move this conversation to a /Discussion? subpage.

Dieter: I think several moves can be locally urgent at the same time and even globally. If there is only one single urgent move, we mostly call it the only move.