![]() StartingPoints Paths Referenced by Homepages
|
Where Is Go Going
Path: StatisticalAnalysis · Prev: MoveOneLosesTheGame · Next: CornerCoOrdinationStatistics
Keywords: Culture & History
Dear all, I'd just like to share some thoughts and feelings that I've been munching in my head lately. I'd be very glad to hear your opinions and criticisms, of course. I started to play go in the early eighties, giving up chess in the meanwhile: it looked to me as if the latter was becoming too cramped, almost claustrophobic.
Two aspects of go I loved most (and still do): on the one hand, its subtlety, deepness and stress on flexibility and on keeping open as much and as long as possible the largest number of possibilities. In the eighties, if I remember correctly, very few professionals played long, complicated and drawn out josekis: Cho Chikun once said that he didn't like them because they simplified the game too much, taking away subtlety. Kobayashi was criticised very often by his fellow professionals (especially Takemiya...) for settling the shape as much as he could. On the other hand, I adore the great role played by intuition and "feeling" (something that I couldn't find in chess). I'm not saying that brute force reading and calculation are not important, especially so when you go through chuban to yose, but in fuseki and early chuban intuition has wide scope for action: no fuseki is like another one (not so in chess...). Not for nothing are my heroes Shuko, Takemiya and Otake! It is true that intuition and feeling can be seen as skills that one acquires with the experience, playing and studying literally thousands of games. (Mind you, I am a post-hippie, my generation is the one that looked toward India and the "Orient" at large to find something that we couldn't find in our western, rational mind. So it is quite obvious that I would cherish these aspects of the game of go, maybe missing or misunderstanding some others.) Then I stopped playing for ten years, and when I resumed a couple of years ago, what kind of situation did I find (and please correct me if I'm wrong)?
In the East, the arrival of strong, very strong Korean and Chinese players: this is really great, as otherwise the game could have ended up as something for a few pros and for a bunch of aged people in Japan... But this meant also, as I perceive it, the affirmation of a very aggressive style right from the beginning, and the appearance of almost established fuseki sequences where long, complicated, drawn-out josekis are instrumentally played in order to settle the shape quickly and go directly to a sort of oyose stage, where it's easier to calculate the value of moves.
In the West, there are a number of attempts to formalise the game using game theory and other mathematical and logic tools. One of the reasons for this is of course the possibility to arrive at writing a software that would be able to play at a reasonable level, but we have seen few results so far. Luckily, I say. Couldn't all the energies spent in these intellectual quests be spent instead on playing and spreading the game? It seems to me that all that mathematical, logical and theoretical arguing would scare any beginner (not to mention myself), making him/her believe that without a PhD in mathematics you cannot play go: not a good advertisment indeed!
I'm not saying that those approaches to the game have no validity (and after all I'm still 3k and shouldn't talk much...).
Now I await your criticisms and opinions. HolIgor: I am not strong enough to judge the trends in modern professional go, but I know that there is one big difference between go and chess. Chess suffocates in draws and go does not. I remember that when I read the rules for the first time I was amazed by the absence of draws. It seemed to me a very unjust thing. Imagine, you work hard, you play well, not worse than your opponent and in the end everything is decided by the last ko. Today I lost a game by a half point again. I won a lot of games by a half point. It is a lottery. I imagine that playing against Yi Ch'ang-ho many players would agree to a lottery. Yi Chang-ho would not, of course. This is a matter of strength and weakness. Freedom is a strange thing. According to Marx it is recognized necessity. At some point I understood that I can't win making any moves. I have to make correct moves. This point in the games moves closer and closer to the opening, to fuseki. But it is still very far. At move 50 or so. Recently I discovered importance of turning first. Playing with it now. I admire the way dan players discuss the moves in the fuseki. I have no clue. I call it divination. How much will the opponent be able to get by attacking my weak group? Recently I discoved that a line of ikken-tobi has a good fighting and eye forming potential. But to what extent? I've heard that pros study fuseki to yose now. But at the same time somebody in the rgg tried to find in a database the longest fuseki sequence common for more than 3 games. I don't remember the size of the database, but it was not small. The longest line was 6 moves. It is really unbelievable.
B 1 - 1056 games: W won 470 and B won 586 W 2 - 564 games: W won 249 and B won 315 B 3 - 257 games: W won 106 and B won 151 W 4 - 124 games: W won 51 and B won 73 B 5 - 98 games: W won 40 and B won 58 W 6 - 53 games: W won 25 and B won 28 (notice how White suddenly narrows the gap in results!) B 7 - 46 games: W won 21 and B won 25 W 8 - 46 games: W won 21 and B won 25 B 9 - 46 games: W won 21 and B won 25 W 10 - 26 games: W won 14 and B won 12
B 11 - 26 games: W won 14 and B won 12 W 12 - 26 games: W won 14 and B won 12 B 13 - 13 games: W won 7 and B won 6 W 14 - 13 games: W won 7 and B won 6
B 15 - 8 games: W won 4 and B won 4 There are a couple of interesting points here (based in part on some further analysis of the data on the CD). The reference point is White 10 where the winning percentage for White exceeds that for Black:
--Stefan: Fascinating! I knew that pros (especially in Korea) spend a very, very large amount of time on research, and I knew that there were certain preferred fuseki at any given point in time. But I didn't know the phases in fuseki fashion were as fast or frequent as this evidence seems to indicate. HolIgor: It seems that the process that AvatarDJ mentions is really under way. It is a natural thing though. White did well with the position after move 10 so, the variation was popular. Then Black comes with a new move and starts to win more often than lose. Naturally nobody wants to continue it for white till somebody comes with a new idea for White countering Black's move at a. It is natural that the professionals study what other people play and remember the result. This is like the situation with chess, but it seems to me that this is not a new thing under the moon. In the era when everybody played Shusaku fuseki the move sequences were long too. They were much more difficult to collect and analyze though. With computer databases every pro can actually see statistics of any variation to the moment where the game really starts. In go the choice of the moves in fuseki is wider than is chess, of course, and the variations should be shorter, but still they would be there. The actual game would happen in the chuban and yose, while there would be a quite decent amount of openings to use. I would use this approach as I did not develop that fuseki intuition and play first 20-30 moves just scattering stones on the board trying to avoid situations that I know would be unpleasant for me. Dieter: I'd like to react to one statement in AvatarDJFlux's highly interesting post. Couldn't all the energies spent in these intellectual quests be spent instead on playing and spreading the game? As with all cultural and intellectual features, the quest for perfect play or formalization does not necessarily harm spreading and enjoying the game. I've been teaching math for a week now to 13-year olds. The methods used in the textbook are highly intuitive at the expense of logical reasoning and proof. The kids adore it. Meanwhile, others continue to formalize math at a very high level, or explore the extremities of the well known paths. Learning the basics and exploring the limits are the opposite ends of the intellectual process. There is little reason to mix them up - although refreshing the basics does good to every explorer. Charles Matthews A couple of comments. Firstly John Fairbairn of GoGod does collect nadare games as a priority. Secondly I find it helpful to attribute purely aggressive play to the Chinese influence in contemporary go. The Korean approach is more like an intermediate between that and the Japanese, artistic tradition in the game. It also does represent a convergence with the way chess has been studied. In some sense this seems to be a consequence of the general adoption of 4-4 points - and the difficulty of coming to any conclusions. BobMcGuigan: What about Go Seigen's criticism of modern (Japanese?) go and his exposition of his ideas in his "21st Century" series? I don't know all the details but I remember he condemned the study of joseki saying that it is regrettable that the idea of "joseki" is all that has come out of go study in Japan. It seems to me that there is a lot more experimentation, and a lot more new patterns being played than 20 years ago. On the other hand the contrast between territory-oriented styles and influence (moyo) or thickness-oriented styles persists. Charles When I have gone through recent yearbooks (Igo Nenkan) from Japan actually looking for innovations, that isn't the impression I have got. Joseki innovation is at a low ebb, it seems, compared to what one could read in the annual books by Abe Yoshiteru in past years. To some extent that's because modern fuseki patterns bypass older ideas on corner joseki, placing more emphasis on the sides. But I believe that if you did a comparison between a Japanese yearbook and the corresponding Chinese or (particularly) Korean books, you'd end up thinking that the Japanese are more conservative. That can certainly be quantified by breaking down the fuseki patterns (I do this for my own purposes, into about 100 types). Bob: I was actually thinking of the Chinese and Koreans when I spoke of innovations. I haven't looked at Abe's new move and new pattern books for a while but I have the impression that most of the innovations occur in games between lower ranked players rather than the title holders. By the time the top players use an idea it probably doesn't qualify as new any more, but I think Cho Chikun has tried new things in title match games occasionally. Go Seigen's ideas reject the large scale joseki trends and emphasize overall fuseki ideas. Some of these have been tried in title matches, for example white plays the high two space approach to black's 3-4 corner stone, black answers at 5-3 and white tenukis. This does emphasize the side more than the corner, as Charles said. Charles Yes, following this up on a database, a new pattern emerging since 2000.
This is being tried, with the Kobayashi fuseki when
I get the feeling that this is typical enough, incremental change within a very familiar setting. The move at
BobMcGuigan: Path: StatisticalAnalysis · Prev: MoveOneLosesTheGame · Next: CornerCoOrdinationStatistics This is a copy of the living page "Where Is Go Going" at Sensei's Library. ![]() |