62.237.44.16: Re: Proposed terminology (2011-12-21 23:10) [#9162]

Bill: This page is a essay. It presents the ideas of someone about what they call sente nature. Yet there is little to identify it as an essay. Would parentheses do so? Would a title like About the nature of sente be better?

I deliberately did not put my name on the page to put emphasis on it being an encyclopaedic article on the meaning of the word.

Bill: This page proposes new terminology for one of the established senses of the term sente. It shows examples where a play is sente in this sense, but not in another sense.

I thought it would be useful to explicitly show the difference in the senses. As you point out yourself, the terminology is not really all that new, but well established instead. On a page where two senses of a word are contrasted, there must be a way to separate the terms from each other. Please feel free to replace every instance of sente nature with sente³ or the like, if you feel it makes the page more readable.

The page Basic Endgame Theory used the two concepts confusingly, which was my motivation for creating this page. (As you have reverted my edit, this is again the case.) The bit about sente in the endgame has to do with the basic idea of it being very useful to keep the initiative, and in this context the meaning of sente is very explicitly about initiative. In this context, saying A move or sequence in the endgame is considered to be sente if its follow-up is larger than the value of preventing it is quite misleading. The page does mention (in a typeface much quieter than the quoted proclamation) that "there is another concept". This concept, however, is much less important for the purposes of playing a good endgame. Its importance does warrant a mention on the page, but great care should be taken that the intended reader, the beginning player who wants to learn the basics of endgame, understands that the meaning of the newly learned word is now completely different from what it was just two lines before.

Or so I thought when I made the change :-)