15 March 2003
Fhayashi: Any thoughts about putting together a JosekiLibrary in SL?
Charles Matthews Many. It's a path of least resistance, really. It has been discussed inconclusively before, for example at Whither Joseki. My current thoughts:
But what did you have in mind?
Fhayashi: There are plenty of joseki libraries on the web, but the commentaries on each variation tend to be limited. All the books say "Study joseki, don't memorize them", so I thought a library on SL would facilitate discussion on them - i.e. why each move is where it is, what to do when your opponent varies from joseki, etc.
Charles I think we do that here, too. There are joseki articles - now numerous; anyone can raise a query for discussion, naturally. So, are we talking about some new structure? A page per known variation probably comes to about 5000. It is hardly possible to anticipate all non-joseki moves, is it? There are questions of that type in the BQM series.
I think it would be a good idea gradually to organise by links all the joseki material on the site by variation - this could be done by the end of 2003. But if one tries to add the whole of joseki knowledge at once, what happens is that one adds a large number of 'stub' pages with no content above what would be in an uncommented SGF file. This isn't a great idea, and it isn't so interesting to do either. I'll admit that I have done something similar for the unusual enclosures, on about 1% of the scale.
Fhayashi: I think the organisation of the joseki information is what I'm interested in. Somewhere to start, like a path for joseki information on SL, to begin with.
Charles Pincer path, for example, gives quick access to around 20 joseki. There are half-a-dozen paths already devoted to particular joseki: some but not all of those are referenced by Guided Tours. From my point of view the joseki page itself is the first place to look, arranging joseki by indentation: probably that has gone nearly as far as it can. My own policy is breadth-first development of the joseki pages.
I can see that 'random access' is the final test: whether it is possible quickly to find a given joseki on the site (or detect its absence). The matter of page nomenclature and codes for joseki has been discussed, again inconclusively. What we have now is a system of verbose names for joseki, not entirely standardised and certainly not very memorable. But I believe it is improving over time.