They used the same excuse for flying cars. Quit slacking!

Joking aside (I hope it was clear that I was tongue-in-cheek), I would be perfectly happy with a Crazystone-style comment system : here are the moves where your (estimated) win probability decreased most compared to then engine's choice. See http://www.remi-coulom.fr/CrazyStone/an ... index.html if you don't see what I mean. Of course by "happy" I mean "ready to pay good money".

Maybe I should call that an "analysis" instead of a "commentary"? Anyway it seems to me that building this feature from a working go engine would require less work than a full-fledged human-aimed commentary engine, and it is literally the only feature that I would use (I would have bought Crazystone long ago if it worked on my machine).

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La victoire est un hasard, la défaite une nécessité.

There is some evidence that slower games can produce better games. Just watch fast server games and you almost always see bad moves that the player wouldn't make if there were more time. There are numerous examples of pros making errors in byo-yomi, too, so it seems likely to me that a pro would generally make better moves given longer thinking time. I think the term "soba go" isn't describing what makes longer time limits related to better go. The crucial benefit of longer time limits is the opportunity for deeper reading, rather than judging probabilities. Forty years ago a pro commentator on the NHK TV tournament in Japan (sorry I can't remember just which pro) said that TV games produce more fighting games than slower tournament games and gave the reason being that in long-time-limit games the players can pretty much completely read out the fights.

It is obvious that for commercial purposes shorter time limits will attract a larger audience of fans watching the games. When a server is broadcasting a long-time-limit game, such as a Honinbo match game, many people ask questions on the online venue regarding why it is taking so long for moves to be made and how boring it is. Sponsors get more exposure from faster games. When I watch such games on line I like to think along with the players, I don't mind taking an hour to think about what will happen next, there is a lot to be learned that way. Saying one kind of go is "better" than another is a question that is difficult to answer. A response that dodges the question is that better go has fewer or no mistakes, is closer to perfect play; the players know that their moves are the best moves, there is little or no estimation of probabilities.

gowan, games with fast time limits make mistakes, but so do games with longer time limits. It is biased to point out only the former.

Popular YouTuber Haylee (Hajin Lee) recently pointed out that pros generally agree that pros from today are stronger than pros from the past (who didn't play with the ****-ing so called Mickey Mouse time limits), because today's pros can see mistakes from pros from the past.

It's not a bad thing - it's called human progress.

Despite this, pros still study older games that didn't have fast time limits.

That's because, unlike us, they are not obsessed with arguing about Mickey Mouse - they are interested in actually learning from one another. That's how progress was made in the first place.

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be immersed

The point about Go becoming dominated by younger players due to decreased time limits is very interesting.

Is it true though? If we look at title matches for that top 3 titles in Japan, we can see that the average age of title holders has decreased over time, while the time limits stayed the same pretty much since the 60's or so.
To me, this shows that it is a change in Go training/playing that resulted in this shift towards younger player dominating the professional Go scene, not the change in time limits.

I don't think a 3h game quality is much different than a 9h game quality.

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Sorin - 361points.com

I suppose it really depends on what you want to get from playing go. If the most important thing is winning, making the game very complicated might increase your opponent's chances of making a mistake and this approach might be a reasonable strategy. This approach might be effective with shorter time limits because your opponent might not be able to read out the complications. In longer time limits this approach wouldn't be effective because both players could read out the fight. I would like to see the best possible go played. Of course, mistakes are also made in long time limit games as well as in shorter time limit games, though I'd guess that there are more mistakes in the shorter games. As for modern pros being stronger than the historical greats, I'm not so sure that that can be judged by modern pros seeing mistakes in the older games. Modern pros have the advantage of all the discoveries and work of the older players; if there were a level playing field who knows which would be stronger.

Oversimplification. Having six-hours of time does not mean you can "read out the fight". Your argument works if we are discussing the endgame. In the endgame, the situation can be completely read out. So longer time limits might result in more optimal play.

For middle game situations, your argument is purely speculation.



Yes, you are guessing. I probably agree with you about the endgame. But I don't think your argument holds for other parts of the game.



Yes, modern pros have the advantage of earlier discoveries. That's the point, and it's why the level of Go has progressed. It's not to say that historical greats were not impressive for knowing what they did at their time. But pros are getting stronger as time goes on.

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be immersed

Kirby: Gowan's remarks about longer time suggesting higher quality are not pure speculation. There have been thousands upon thousands of commentaries. A simple survey will show that longer games tend to come with many more "brilliant move" type comments and far fewer "mistake" type comments than fast games. Even in Korean commentaries. I have done research on this field for ICOB papers.

Furthermore, extra time is not necessarily devoted to reading out fights. In fact, in my experience it is hardly devoted to direct reading at all. It is devoted to evaluation (including but not limited to counting). I have seen at first hand, many times, how pros see very deep lines instantly. Then at the end of each line they stop and think - is that stone really on the right spot given that group on the other side, and stuff like that. One example I recall was being in the pressroom with Ishida during a title match. A move was played in the middle game. By definition he had never seen that position before. Once the move was relayed in he slapped about 40 stones down on the board (no ladders). Paused briefly, picked up about 20 of the stones and slapped 20 more down, paused again, looked at Kato and asked whether A was better than B. (As it happens, I was not amazed by that, because I'd seen it all before. The reason I remember it vividly is because I've never seen anyone pick up so many stones so quickly, mostly in one hand).

This is well supported anecdotally. For example, Go Seigen commenting on why Kitani played so slow. He said it was nothing to do with seeing the moves, as Kitani could see instantly more moves than anyone else. He spent his time comparing the variations. Go's comment in turn is supported by examples of vast depth and complication (yose-kos and the like) that Kitani had apparently seen instantly and which made fellow pros gag.

In fact it is a truism that the strongest players tend to be strongest whatever speed they play at. In chess, Carlsen is the world's highest rated player in classical, rapid and blitz play. In go, the last 8 in the NHK Cup tends to reflect the slate of title winners in the slow major events. It's not the quality of the player that time affects; it is the quality of the game (I have argued that that quality loss is reflected not just in more countable mistakes and fewer countable brilliancies but in a change of style; that's a different debate but it doesn't affect the countability of the number of mistakes).

I am not alone in my views. Even in Korea. As you well know, but seem to choose to ignore, many Korean pros, led by Cho Hun-hyeon, have decried the impact of faster time limits in their domestic game. But too many modern tournaments everywhere are becoming a feeding frenzy instead of a banquet. My own grandchidren prefer KFC fast food over Michelin stars. Love then even more than I love you; so much so I've even been prepared to accept greasy fingers. But when it comes to a question of food alone, I prefer still to sit in a proper restaurant.

Sorin: Time limits in Japan have decreased markedly since the 1960s. Whether that explains the rise of young players fully or at all we can't be sure, because it has also been paralleled by reforms giving young players quicker access to the higher regions of tournaments. But personally I'm sure it's a factor because older players have not adapated to the change in style required. It's interesting to me that very many young Japanese players have visited China and Korea to seek improvement. They seem to feel that the new style cannot be acquired properly at home. You view that the quality of a 3h game is not much different from a 9h seems beside the point. At pro level a game is so finely balanced that one mistake can decide the outcome. So even a tiny difference assessable only in a longer game can have a catastrophic effect.

If I may go back to my point about commentaries. If you presented me with two pro games, one fast and one slow, and asked me to say which is which, I would be quite lost. I rely on the commentaries to tell me. But once I know, I prefer the higher quality game (normally the slower one) simply because it teaches good habits for me, and the game has greater internal consistency. It's not quite true to say that fast, mistake-laden games teach bad habits, because if that style of play is best for modern tournament play, maybe that should be your role model. But in my case I don't play in tournaments and I'm not looking for cheap thrills. In fact I don't find fast games exciting at all. I have watched countless late-night fast games on Baduk TV in Korean hotels as I struggle to overcome jet-lag. I find they are quite a good way of making my eyes glaze over.

Interesting, are these long games new ones (as in last 10 years), such as Honinbo / Kisei 8 hour title match games, or older ones like Go Seigen's ten-game matches? My impression (not done any research) from An Younggil's commentaries of the former on gogameguru.com is he doesn't find it any harder to find mistakes in those games, compared to the 2-3 hour or so (do you consider those Mickey Mouse?) games of international/non-Japanese tournaments. But maybe that's just a reflection that the current top Japanese players (except Iyama) aren't so strong.

Some perhaps-useful analogies with chess, which I do know something about:

As John Fairbairn says, the strongest players are the strongest players whatever the time control. Sometimes someone will be particularly strong or weak in blitz, but this generally means something like they are #20 in the world at classical time controls and #5 in blitz.

Longer time controls do make for games of higher quality. This is particularly noticeable in the endgame. Modern games are not adjourned, due to the quality of computer analysis, so must be finished in one session, the result of which is that during the endgame modern players are often "living on the increment" (the equivalent of byo-yomi) and are taking ~30 seconds per move to think instead of ~3 minutes like the players of old.

In general older players do better (relatively) at short games than at long games, because they can use their considerable intuition and don't have to maintain concentration for 5+ hours. It seems that go may be different in this regard?

In contrast to John Fairbairn's experience with go, I like to learn from fast pro chess games more than slow ones. A grandmaster playing a blitz game is using his instinct, and that's instinct that I would like to learn to imitate. If he would play a different move in a slow game, it's likely because in the slow game he's spent long minutes doing a difficult calculation, something that I could not hope to duplicate and that is less likely to be useful in improving my own tournament play.

This was my impression, too: mistakes can just as easily be found in slower games, too. They might be different types of mistakes, I suppose.

You can call your own opinion "research", but it doesn't make it true - "even in Korea".

FWIW, faster time limits have led to new ways of studying. It's not uncommon to study opening strategies extensively so that significant time isn't needed during the opening. That way, more effort can be spent on the middle game. In some ways, this could lead to a more interesting game, since the core of the brilliance behind the game happens during the middle gamme - where the result is often determined.

Just because you don't spend a significant amount of time at the board while the clock is running doesn't mean you're not spending a lot of time. Top pros study tremendously these days, and surely that helps in making faster and accurate decisions.

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be immersed

I would like to hear what difference in style John sees between longer versus shorter time limits. Just basing my opinion only on the games I've watched or played through I see a difference but I can't quantify it. As for reading things out, I include such things as evaluation of variations and judging outcomes as "reading". I don't mean reading a fight out equals reading out the game result. Rather I mean smaller scale fights such as invasions, tenuki in a complicated position, results of new joseki moves, etc. In slower games top pros can accurately read 40 or more moves ahead in certain middle game whole board situations. If faced with a new move in a complicated joseki (e.g. in avalanche or taisha or some 5-4 joseki), even pro-level reading takes some time. In this kind of situation even a fast player like Takemiya has taken an hour to decide on a move.

In judging historical players versus modern players, of course modern players know more of go theory and tactics (joseki) than older players. How strong a player is is not determined by what he/she knows, rather what they do with what they know. If a modern 9p commentator says that an historical player such as Dosaku played a brilliant tesuji, can't we conclude that in at least a single case Dosaku was playing at a modern 9p level?

Lest it was interpreted otherwise, my comment about "my impression" was not meant to denigrate John's research claim (which I believe), as Kirby has. I just wanted some clarity on what we were comparing with what. My impression (principally from reading John's books on them) is that the Go Seigen jubango games were of higher quality than today's Honinbo/Kisei title match games (8 hours), but the later are of similar quality to Korean/Chinese/international 2-3 hour games (perhaps those Korean/Chinese pros would play better games with 8 hours). Of course BadukTV 30 second byo-yomi games are lower quality. BTW, do many games in Japan have long time limits (> 1 day) other the few big title matches? I think Honinbo/Kisei etc league games are 1 day games, so probably 4 hours each?

John, we both know that mistakes are present in both "slow" games (6 hours+) and "fast" games (e.g. 2 or 3 hours). We are arguing about the relative quantity. Uberdude pointed out that pro commentary can still find mistakes in these slow games, seemingly pretty easily. This suggests that slow games are not necessarily in a different category, immune to error.

You have admitted that, given a "fast" game and given a "slow" game, you cannot distinguish the two. Rather than rely on your own judgement, you can gain understanding from commentary.

If you are truly interested in game quality, why not take the same approach for all games? Mistakes happen in both types of games. Brilliant moves happen in both types of games. Pro commentary can give you insight in both cases.

If you discount modern games as blitz, filled with mistakes, it's not only an over-generalization - you lose a learning opportunity.

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be immersed

Lest I be interpreted otherwise, I believe John's claim that there are pro commentaries where they find mistakes on games having faster time settings.

But going from that to making a blanket statement about fast time settings - that's what I have an issue with.

If John or anyone else is truly interested in game quality, they should look for it in games of all types - not just games with 6 hour+ time settings.

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be immersed

Anyway, the point that we can learn from fast games just as well as from slow games is all I am really trying to express in this thread. I don't mean to "denigrate" anybody's opinion.

So I will stop here.

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be immersed

Well, it looks to me like JF said slower games tend to have more brilliant moves and fewer mistakes (in the commentaries at least, I wonder if there is a bias of older commentaries being polite/deferential and not pointing out mistakes, I note the blurb from Relentless from GoGameGuru says "Finally, the commentary is honest. In the past, some books portrayed professional Go players like gods and politely overlooked small mistakes. We make no apologies for doing away with this convention.") and he had done research that backed this up, but then you dismissed this as simply his opinion. This makes sense to me and I expect it is true: Lee Sedol with 8 hours will play better than Lee Sedol with 3 hours and Takao Shinji with 8 hours will play better than Takao Shinji with 3 hours (assuming they have enough rest to not get fatigued). But because Lee is a stronger player than Takao I suspect Lee with 3 hours could well play better than Takao with 8 hours, hence An Younggil finding mistakes in both the games. So that's why I wondered if JF's positive views of slow games also applied to the current crop of top Japanese players in their title macthes or just the great masters of old like Go Seigen. (Here I assuming that Lee is stronger than Takao (and even Iyama), some people might disagree and say the Japanese only do badly in the international tournaments because of the shorter (~2-3 hour) time limits, but I think if you gave them both 8 hours the top Korean/Chinese pros would still triumph).

Well, I do think it's an opinion. Presumably, it was formed on the basis of reading various pro commentaries.
You, yourself, have some knowledge of pro games and commentaries. You can call that research, too, if you'd like.

To be perfectly honest, my aggression is due to the fact that I am somewhat annoyed. I think it's clear that I don't appreciate terms referring "Micky Mouse", et. al., but they continue to be used. Now a new phrase is thrown in, too ("even in Korea"). Even if it's clear that the rhetoric annoys me, you all have free speech, and I can't argue with it.

But it doesn't keep me from getting angry.

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be immersed

For the avoidance of doubt, I regard as Mickey Mouse time as limits those with 30 seconds a move, or similar. 3h I would class as "rapid" if we take the perhaps sensible approach of adopting the chess trichotomy: blitz, rapid and classical. Chess blitz is probably a lot faster than MM, but go has probably always had longer limits than chess at any level. Maybe go should use Micky Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy categories? (And I'll accept the persona of Eeyore if Kirby agrees to be Tigger.)

My conclusion that slower games have more !! and fewer ?? than fast games is based on go in the second half of the 20th century (and is based also on close textual analysis of yearbooks (mainly Korean Yearbooks) where commentaries are roughly of the same length and in the same style regardless of the time limits. I was not actualy analysing time limits but was compiling frequency-based go vocabulary for a CAT course called "Korean for Baduk Players". As I expected (I had previous experience of teaching technical Japanese at a university successfully by this method), it worked quite well (T Mark was the guinea pig), and I even presented it at ICOB, but the internet pirates dissuaded me from doing the extensive work of producing it commercially. It left me with a set of strong and maybe useful "opinions", though.

Uberdude's point about possible sycophancy in commentaries is valid - up to a point. The scrupulous (and welcome) honesty claimed for Relentless is not new, of course: Nozawa Chikucho gave Shusai a major kicking and got expelled for it. But even without the threat of expulsion there is a general tendency to say "I'd prefer to play X" instead of "X is a crap move," and if you are not attuned to the mores of certain go commentators you can inadvertently end up taking their comments at face value. One way of highlighting different pro opinions about moves is to use multiple commentaries, as I did in the Go Seigen series. I at least found this very illuminating.

Games before about 1950 don't come into the reckoning in this regard. Edo/Meij games were played without clocks and there were no fast games as such. Fast games did come in in the 1930s, but in those days, and even into the 1960s, fast meant 5h each.

I do not dispute that it is possible to learn from fast games. I just believe amateurs are more likely to learn mistakes from them (e.g. over-optimistic invasions).

If you actually cared about my opinion, it would be clear that my distaste is for your lack of respect for games played under modern time limits.

You can call me Tigger, Donald Duck, a demon, or whatever you feel like.

It doesn't bother me like the use of terms like "Mickey Mouse" time limits.

But you already know that, so we are wasting our time.

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be immersed

I am interested by this claim. FIDE "classical" events are almost all played under a time limit of ~2h30 per player (1h30 for 40 moves plus 0h30 for the rest of the game, with a Fisher increment of 30 seconds). This includes the World Championship. The go equivalent would include not only top pro tournaments, but also all strong amateur tournaments (say European Congress, Grand Slam tournaments, etc.) On the top of my head, I think this 2h30 per player figure applies pretty well for the go world today.

Rapid is between 10 and 60 minutes: this sounds like the standard league or local tournament time setting.

Blitz is 10 minutes or less per player: also what we would call "blitz" in go.

(Figures taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_chess)

Overall, I would claim that chess has time limits very similar to go at all levels, except specifically Japanese title tournaments, whose time limits are virtually unseen in chess.

Therefore my question is: when you say that "go has probably always had longer limits than chess at any level", do you think that, following the comparison with chess, this is a correct representation: the entirety of the Western go world has never play what amounts to a go game with "classical" time limits ; that all amateur tournaments are ranging from blitz to rapid, with most of them blitz ("Mickey Mouse") ; and that all of online go is blitz, including 30 min+ games?

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La victoire est un hasard, la défaite une nécessité.