Ko - overhaul of material

   

Here is an overview of all pages and how we think they should be treated, plus their difficulty level.

Table of contents

Paths

Tapir: The last 3 paths were prepared by RJ according to current difficulty keywords. I believe in the end 5 "difficulty paths" will be too much, but instead one or two topic paths will be needed.
Dieter: done some renaming, but clearly the levels are too fine grained.
RobertJasiek: Tapir, not according to the keywords but according to my quick reading of the pages and judgement whether they are for kyus, dans or experts. Currently many ko pages' level keywords are wrong; we need to correct many of them later.
tapir: Indeed. + I would welcome the addition of one or two paths by topic. Currently expert level is just an exclusion mark (really not beginners stuff), although e.g. "primary ko threat" itself isn't so difficult to understand. A path by topic or a clearly structured section in a taxonomy would perform better. The former second course on ko maybe can function as a taxonomy (and renamed as such). I would limit difficulty level paths to a maximum 3, say putting advanced and expert in one path and there isn't much introductory ko material on the level of "atari", "liberty", "eye" pages to merit an own path. tapir: How do you find the Ko Pages - Taxonomy right now? Starts looking like a workable path page, I am not sure at all how to assemble a collection of beginner pages to make the beginner path.


Pages

Traditional Terms

Dieter: It seems we agree a traditional term should not have a difficulty level, except maybe "introductory"? (Bill said they shouldn't and Tapir said it's useful to remind they don't have to)

  • Ko main term, can be a definition as wel as a reference page for all other relevant pages
  • Ko Threat

Bill: We need a separate Ko Threat - Introductory page to give an informal notion of ko threat.

Result of SL specific discussions or research

Bill: Remove? Since I am the theorist in question, you might rather make it a sub-page of mine. As for merging with the ko threat page, haven't you heard of hypertext? I know from painful experience that putting too much material on a single SL page can lead to confusion and dissension. RobertJasiek: subpage of a homepage is bad. I want to find things. When they are hidden at counter-intuitive places, it would be too hard to find.

Tapir: This needs work, as I managed to only write one correct and one misleading sentence. To me it seems, there are only secondary ko threats in "hot" kos, where moves are significantly larger than ambient temperature. While the whole idea of a secondary ko threat doesn't work in kos that are on the board for a long time, but played only when moves in them are about as large as moves elsewhere. In such Kos you better play tenuki instead of playing a too small ko threat that gains less than two tenuki.

tapir: I like the term "almighty pae/ko" (YYS's book). It is so powerful that it dictates what to play, and any change would lose the game, but winning the ko in itself, doesn't necessarily win the game. Is that nitpicking?

Hyperpape: sounds good to me. isd: Seems a bit of a pointless page. Any move can be so big it decides the game, why do we need a game deciding ko page, it's like a game deciding atari page - silly.

tapir: It is still a ko, but a ko which is fought differently because it is so big. I would rename to almighty ko though.

RobertJasiek: Both game-deciding ko and almighty ko are used in literature. The former is more frequent, AFAIR.

Tapir: Doesn't work as is.

Bill: A minority of good players believe that any move can be a ko threat. The issue should be discussed.

tapir: The said discussion is 5-6 yrs. old. While I doubt anyone would have noticed if we had removed it... I seriously don't believe it is important for this discussion to have an individual page, when there is so much space at ko threat / discussion. Anyway, we should discuss the main pages / beginner pages mainly. There is where is most work to do.
isd: The page looks pretty much without merit to me. It gives no presentation of the topic, it's basically just a talk page and should be rewritten or wiped.
Robert: The talk is important for those who care. WME is a good idea.

Bill: Since I am the researcher who found real half point kos, let me say that they are decidedly not what are normally referred to as half point kos. Adding a definition to the half point ko page would be good, but merging introduces clutter and reduces clarity. Hypertext!

Bill: IMHO sente ko is an important classification that is not hard to understand.

tapir: But it needs work. It seems you don't see the example as a sente ko anymore yourself.

Bill: I agree with keeping it, since it appears in the literature. But since we agreed long ago to deprecate the term on SL, no point in guiding beginners to it.

tapir: Indeed.

Bill: AFAIK, this is the only public discussion of this topic in English, perhaps in any language. SL may well be the best source of ko material in the world.

Technique & Advice

tapir: Split the page into exercise and basics page. Don't worry, this won't be the final state of this. The examples look a little lost when they are just exercise 2.

Hyperpape: I would like to see examples on the main page, even if the exercise was too complicated.

tapir: Me too. It should bring one message across - threats involving life and death are bigger! The other half isn't really an exercise yet as well. Please change back or add or rewrite as you wish. I won't touch the page for today.

Tapir: I would love people to contribute to this page. (I also would be happy to see expert comments on my proposal to distinguish different loss-making threats. I have my hobby horses too.)

Tapir: I find this page doubtful. It looks like started but not really continued. The point in question is, there are ko threats with a sente, an ambiguous or a gote followup which itself can be sente, ambiguous (or in case of giving the ko away: gote moves) - what is the value of a threat then?

Tapir: Pretty difficult argument for a rule of thumb.

Merged with other page.

RJ: Propose to rename CaptureFirst?

tapir: no. at times a technique to jump in deeper, threaten ko instead of direct capture... - this has more to do with invasions or the reverse monkey jump than with ko itself


Games & exercises

Tapir: I would rename to games involving ko (with the understanding of this being usually professional games). The famous just make people wonder where to add other game examples.

Possibly outdated pages that met little resistance for removal or cleanup

Books



Additional pages

  • tapir/Typical Mistakes in Ko Fights : could relieve other pages and be dedicated to mistakes only
  • isd: I would like to see a 'How to play Ko' page for beginners
    • tapir: Yes. It might be useful to separate this from 'Introduction to Ko'-kind of page. A 'How to play Ko' page can be much more didactical. Topics like "Is it necessary to fight this ko?", "Count ko threats before starting a ko.", "Create / remove / promote ko threats before starting a ko.", "Is my threat really a threat?", "Don't play loss-making threats." go a surprisingly long way to improve practical ko performance even in the low dan range. (At least when I remember the review of kos we played in the group class.)
  • tapir: We need a page on those moves who change the size of the ko instead of resolving it.

Discussion from subpage

  • Ko Coupling: Dieter: "doubtful". Robert: If you are not interested in research about Ing Rules, ignore it - but don't judge about which terms make sense. Tapir: Unless, you offer more than a link this page is useless. If we didn't know you it would look suspiciously like link spam. Robert: Oh, I see. It was so long ago that I created the page here... Seems it is not used by SL yet, if I believe Google. The term is specialised for explaining Ing ko rules and related rulesets, so currently the page might be deleted for the time being. But.. "doubtful" is something different; the term is not doubtful but very useful to explain Ing's thinking.
  • External and Internal Ko: Dieter: "doubtful". Robert: First understand my research, then understand the importance about distinguishing outside and inside, then reflect outside versus inside of territory regions or a semeai. Then you will have realised why a distinction is important.

I find these two pages not useful as they stand, and impossible to evaluate for their potential. If Robert wants to add appropriate links and/or explanations, I welcome that. Otherwise, I recommend deletion or merging until he or someone else wants to add the content. That they're products of his research I don't mind, so long as they're well explained. -- Hyperpape

Robert: Ko coupling as an SL page, maybe, see above. - External and internal ko: To understand these terms on the level they are described on the page, you need to acquire the related expert knowledge: Read and understand the linked research papers. Only then will you be able to judge.

Robert: Comment on a related remark on SLAsAnAgeingWiki: How is the page ExternalAndInternalKo confusing or a personal project in disguise? That it is expert level does not mean that it would be confusing but means that you need to study the related research to understand the page's contents. Although it was a personal project to find the correct definitions for "external ko" and "internal ko", neither term is a personal project. Rather it is regular, specialised terminology for the topics ko (strategic term) or ko rules and relevant even for used rulesets like World Mind Sports Games 2008 Rules.

Hyperpape: If the only way to understand them is to read the relevant research and it can't be easily incorporated into senseis, then I recommend folding them into another page. Perhaps link to the papers on another page ("Robert Jasiek has a proposed a classification scheme...") put them on your personal page and its subpages or something like that.

RobertJasiek: If this were done, then SL might as well abandon ALL expert pages incl. all CGT and komonsters. But... see my reply to tapir below.

Hyperpape I may be missing something about the flow of the discussion, but CGT and komonsters and all that do feature an attempt to explain the terms to readers. My complaint is that one of these two pages is unreadable to anyone not already knowledgable about your work, without links to other sensei's pages that might help to understand, while the other is just a link to an external source. If these terms were explained in similar depth (or even less) than the CGT terms, that would be fine.

RobertJasiek: Most CGT pages here are hard to understand. I often need 5 minutes to read a page and 60 minutes to think about it or read also elsewhere before I really understand something. IOW, the CGT pages are pretty much unreadable for people not regularly familiar with CGT. - My terms are explained in similar depth via the links. If you want them to be explained in that depth here, add such explanation! But don't expect me to make months or in some cases years of research and then add another pile of weeks here for doubled presentation in equal detail.

Tapir: Then please take 10 minutes and add two sentences that the first one is more than a link container. And another five minutes for the second page, that it doesn't start with definitions but an explanation what this is about. This time would be better spent than writing an answer to this message. (You don't have to legitimize your research. But please explain it.)

RobertJasiek: Currently I lack time for such explanations. The problem is not so much improving one particular page as that, when this page is given more attention, people will cry for the next pages to get more details, too. In particular, 1) work and 2) restructuring all ko pages have much higher priority for me.

tapir: The whole exercise is not about removing advanced material or material that might be confusing to beginners, but about better demarcation between advanced and beginner materials and keeping confusing stuff apart. The heavy editing will be in the beginner materials, not in the advanced one. That is how I understood Dieter, and that is what I believe is a good idea.

RobertJasiek: Now this is becoming more reasonable.


This is a copy of the living page "Ko - overhaul of material" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2012 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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