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 Post subject: English translation of Shibano's Fuseki Revolution
Post #1 Posted: Tue Oct 26, 2021 11:48 am 
Gosei

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Kiseido has just issued a translation by John Power of Shibano Toramaru's book Fuseki Kakumei (Fuseki Revolution). The book discusses why Chinese fuseki and Sanrensei are not so popular now, how AI play has changed attitudes toward conventional wisdom andevaluations, and new AI generated joseki.

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Post #2 Posted: Tue Oct 26, 2021 12:34 pm 
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gowan wrote:
Kiseido has just issued a translation by John Power of Shibano Toramaru's book Fuseki Kakumei (Fuseki Revolution). The book discusses why Chinese fuseki and Sanrensei are not so popular now, how AI play has changed attitudes toward conventional wisdom andevaluations, and new AI generated joseki.
Did you get it? What do you think?
There was some more discussion on it here: https://lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=18349

I ended up getting the book in Japanese a few months ago before the English version was announced. I've only gone though a few of the fusekis, mostly the first section. Translating is an effort so I just read the parts I was interested in. I thought about just buying it again in English but I have other books to read too.

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Post #3 Posted: Tue Oct 26, 2021 2:03 pm 
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It is a useful book, readable for players at kyu level through dan levels. I couldn't say whether it is out of date already since I myself am out of date LOL (or is that expression itself out of date). I came up as a go player in the 1970's, thoroughly imbued with the Japanese approach. In fact I still like that way of playing go and I think it offers valuable insights even now that people are disparaging Japanese go. Also I side with John Fairbairn concerning time limits. I believe we need to understand what we are doing. It is no good for humans to imitate machines; just as the development of "deep learning" techniques found a way to play that suits the machine, humans should find a human way to play. I liked hearing Michael Redmond reject an AI move because he just didn't like it, and Shibano also says that he dislikes some of the AI moves. There have been "revolutions" before. I recall how different the playing of Chinese and Korean players seemed when we began to be aware of Chinese go via the visits of Chinese players to Japan and the China-Japan Supergo matches occurred, and Go World covered games of the top Korean players. Well, I got off the topic of Shibano's book, but what I find the most interesting thing about it is that Shibano explains why many of the strange-looking AI moves work.

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Post #4 Posted: Tue Oct 26, 2021 4:51 pm 
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gowan wrote:
... Well, I got off the topic of Shibano's book, but what I find the most interesting thing about it is that Shibano explains why many of the strange-looking AI moves work.


I think AI will not have really arrived until they have cracked the real AI challenge: AIs should be able to provide human comments on their own games, explaining to us humans why they work.

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Post #5 Posted: Tue Oct 26, 2021 6:21 pm 
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gowan wrote:
It is no good for humans to imitate machines; just as the development of "deep learning" techniques found a way to play that suits the machine, humans should find a human way to play. I liked hearing Michael Redmond reject an AI move because he just didn't like it, and Shibano also says that he dislikes some of the AI moves.
I agree to an extent. But I also think that it depends on how close to the AI's skill a player is, or how much stronger a player is compared to the opponent. Top pros can copy AIs because they can back it up. But for me, I'm not going to be able to successfully invade a moyo like an AI, find tesujis like an AI, and I can't be convinced that setting up an elaborate ko is a better move. So I find little point in copying AI beyond what a pro can explain to me. I like Shibano's explanations before they are short. I just did a quick check and many of the variation are only a few moves, with some being around 10 and hardly any approaching 20.
--------------------
hzamir wrote:
I think AI will not have really arrived until they have cracked the real AI challenge: AIs should be able to provide human comments on their own games, explaining to us humans why they work.
I believe even before Alpha Go I was working on a technique to explain gradient boosting tree machine learning(not than neural networks). A quick search shows that Google has been working on this issue: https://cloud.google.com/explainable-ai. I don't know who would sponsor the effort though.

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Post #6 Posted: Wed Oct 27, 2021 4:23 am 
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I read quite a bit of the original Shibano. I had to because I was writing The First Teenage Meijin.

It appealed to me because he had next to no recourse to numbers or win rates. Indeed, it wasn't even clear that he was using AI at all. He said his main approach to the topic was to look at internet games by other pros and see what they were doing differently from normal pro play, on the assumption that they had been copying AI.

This means he has been looking at the topic in away quite different from most people. At least, as far as I can judge, almost all amateurs but also many pros have been taking the approach of monkey see, monkey do. Shibano's approach has been see monkey do, what human think of it?

That's so refreshing. But it's no guarantee that he came up with useful answers. In one sense he did. He won the Meijin. But how much of that was because of psychological effects? How much was random chance?

I personally didn't find much of what he said about AI moves themselves at all useful. The greatest value for me was in what he said about traditional moves seen through the prism of AI moves. Since, as other people have remarked above, we humans still need a rationale we can handle in a practical way to play go, any insights on traditional go which is likewise based on that perspective are likely to help.

In short, just as Shibano let other pros do the donkey work, we amateurs should also let others do the monkey work.

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Post #7 Posted: Wed Oct 27, 2021 5:30 am 
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Where is it possible to buy it in Europe ?

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Post #8 Posted: Wed Oct 27, 2021 6:52 am 
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hzamir wrote:
gowan wrote:
... Well, I got off the topic of Shibano's book, but what I find the most interesting thing about it is that Shibano explains why many of the strange-looking AI moves work.


I think AI will not have really arrived until they have cracked the real AI challenge: AIs should be able to provide human comments on their own games, explaining to us humans why they work.


It's a side note of course but I disagree. Intelligence can show through articulation but it is not restricted by it. Human experts who are inept at explaining why they know what they know, do exist, in spite of the Feynman principle. Ramanujan is a good example. He "saw" properties of numbers without being able to explain to a(nother) human how he was able to do that. It's very similar to AI Go bots showing us sequences without an explanation. In Ramanujan's case, we had good reason to doubt our own intelligence, not his. In AI's case, why should we do otherwise? We already call it artificial to distinguish the nature of the intelligence.

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 Post subject: Re: English translation of Shibano's Fuseki Revolution
Post #9 Posted: Wed Oct 27, 2021 8:17 am 
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When I wrote "imitate" above I meant that the human player makes an AI move only for the reason that an AI made that move in some position. In the past players were chastised for following "joseki" moves without understanding the meaning.

As for Ramanujan's mathematics, he was fortunate that Hardy was willing to spend time and hard work to validate many of Ramanujan's formulas. Ramanujan had been dismissed by other professional mathematicians and I think he might never have been recognized had Hardy not seen Ramanujan's merit. The success of AI players demonstrates the validity of the way AI's play. I wonder whether there could be a method of play that is superior to the current AI method. For example if quantum computers ever develop to a high level of practical function, maybe current AI-style go might be superseded.

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Post #10 Posted: Wed Oct 27, 2021 10:06 am 
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lichigo wrote:
Where is it possible to buy it in Europe ?


My attempt to buy directly from Bozulich has failed this time because I got no clear confirmation that it would be ok.

I looked at Schaak en Gowinkel het Paard but their postage to Germany is too high for a single book.

I asked Hebsacker Verlag (in Germany) and they expect it in November. However, unless you live in Germany, their international postage is also too high, I think.

I have not noticed other European retailers listing that book (yet). It has not been at Amazon.DE or .UK.

So unless you live in the Netherlands or Germany, asking Bozulich directly might still be worth trying because airmail postage from Asia is surprisingly low.

As long as USPS is having trouble with Corona, ordering from Kiseido.USA is not really an option for Europeans.

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Post #11 Posted: Thu Oct 28, 2021 9:16 am 
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Thank you so much, I found it in a store in Paris. I took a look inside but I didn't like it.

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Post #12 Posted: Thu Oct 28, 2021 10:22 am 
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Maybe you'd be more interested in Shibano's new series 定石・布石の常識破壊 (now everything is looking like a yojijukugo idiom) called something like Destruction of Common Sense of Joseki and Fuseki with topics like:

Click Here To Show Diagram Code
[go]$$
$$------------------------------------
$$ - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ - . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 . . |
$$ - . . . 2 . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |-| . . . 4 . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |-| . . . 2 . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |
$$ - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 . 1 . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 . . |
$$ - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ - . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |-| . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |-| . . . , . . . . . 1 . . . . . , . . . |
$$ - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 . . . |
$$ - . . . 4 . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |-| . . . 2 . . . . . , . . . 3 . , 5 . . |-| . . . 4 . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |
$$ - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |-| . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ ---------------------------------------[/go]

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 Post subject: Re: English translation of Shibano's Fuseki Revolution
Post #13 Posted: Fri Oct 29, 2021 6:31 am 
Judan

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lichigo wrote:
I took a look inside but I didn't like it.


What are the reasons for your decision not to buy the book?

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Post #14 Posted: Fri Oct 29, 2021 7:51 am 
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Robert:

I made a few notes when I first looked at the series (I assume the book is a reprint of this). I discontinued when I lost interest, but I'm willing to share what I wrote, on the off-chance it may make some sense to you.

Quote:
FUSEKI REVOLUTION

Solving the puzzle of the disappearance of old patterns

Go Weekly series by Shibano Toramaru


1. NEW SERIES ON DISAPPEARING FUSEKIS

Trains of thought brought on by AI
(2019-01-28)

First the overall picture.

Once common sanrensei and Chinese fuseki have almost disappeared over past couple of years in pro go.

But he emphasises he is not saying they are bad. It is rather that the numbers show they favour White, probably because White has found new countermeasures.

But Black could find new resources, too, and the difference is in any case only about 1 point of komi.

It is therefore no surprise that that there are pros who say: give me 2 points of komi and I'll play sanrensei and the Chinese.

Amateurs should go ahead and play them if they like them.

The openings surveyed here are:

* Sanrensei
* Chinese (including the high (Q9) and also the shorter one (R8)
* The mini-Chinese
* Star and facing kogeimajimari
* The Kobayashi
* The New Kobayashi
* Nirensei (especially the reason for the disappearance of the slide (D2 instead of K4))

(Notes: -tati plural of fuseki and use of rare de iru form.)

2. BIG MOYOS HARD TO SETTLE
Sanrensei - popular with amateurs
(2019-02-04)

Settled pro evaluation is that it is hard for Black to win: too hard to turn moyo into territory.

Moyos have gone down further in estimation since AI.


I know I shouldn't pre-judge, but I'd be rather surprised if you liked it (no numbers, etc). Many others here would appreciate it, but I suspect it would be more those who like to keep in touch with what is going on rather than those striving to get a higher rank.

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Post #15 Posted: Fri Oct 29, 2021 7:59 am 
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I don't know exactly but I felt I will not learn a lot so I am waiting to see if gobooks will do it (cheaper).

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Post #16 Posted: Fri Oct 29, 2021 8:00 am 
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It would be nice if someone shared a link to the publishers blurb if something like that exists for the English translations, or if there is a sample pdf somewhere. If you have some link or when something like that becomes available.

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Post #17 Posted: Fri Oct 29, 2021 10:16 am 
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kvasir wrote:
It would be nice if someone shared a link to the publishers blurb if something like that exists for the English translations, or if there is a sample pdf somewhere. If you have some link or when something like that becomes available.

Here you go: https://www.kiseidopublishing.com/Other.htm#K89
Quote:
K89: Fuseki Revolution How AI Has Changed Go
by Shibano Toramaru 9-dan
translated by John Power
Go-playing AI programs have changed the very nature of professional go. Since the emergence of AlphaGo in 2016, the conventional wisdom of go has been transformed. Opening patterns previously favored by professionals of all levels have lost popularity and some have disappeared altogether. Large moyos have lost out to the thoroughgoing preference of AI for actual territory and its skill at reducing moyos. Josekis have been transformed, with ‘standard’ moves disappearing and their place being taken by new techniques invented by AI. Even some moves that were previously considered taboo, as being crude or ineffective, have been reassessed by AI and have earned places in the standard repertory. In this book, Toramaru Shibano, one of the top players of his generation, gives his own take on the fuseki revolution. He focuses on changes in the contemporary way of thinking about go strategy, organizing his analysis under the following three main headings.

Chapter One: The reasons why popular openings declined
Chapter Two: Changes in conventional wisdom and new sets of values
Chapter Three: Revolutionary new josekis invented by AI

Shibano maintains an independent attitude about go theory and is not afraid to let us know where and why he sometimes disagrees with AI. In an appendix, Shibano gives his own recommendations on the tactics to use with openings like the sanrensei that still feature strongly in amateur go.

The writings of Shibano on which this book is based have been highly praised by John Fairbairn. His review can be read at: Fairbairn review.
And look! John Fairbairn has highly praised it! ...
John Fairbairn wrote:
I discontinued when I lost interest...
... oh...

-------------------------

I guess this is clear enough from the discussion, but the premise of the book is not to teach you anything. It is just to provide commentary and explain why things changed. Even the discussion of AI plays are just showing now-common sequences. I think the explanation is great. Maybe it gives some better understanding -- but mostly of things that probably aren't being played anymore. If a strong player had taken along break and returned, I think they would appreciate it. I also think that if someone likes one of the older openings, they would appreciate seeing those sequences. But in the end it's a commentary, not a study guide. For me, I like to read it section by section as a reference when I see something come up. Mostly discussion on Sanrensei, Chinese, and Kobayashi fuseki. But there is also discussion on the kosumi response/joseki and the keima press joseki, etc., which comes up a lot. I threw away my marketing slip so I don't know what I paid, but I've read less than a quarter of the book and I'm still happy to have it.

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Post #18 Posted: Sat Oct 30, 2021 5:19 pm 
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Knotwilg wrote:
hzamir wrote:
gowan wrote:
... Well, I got off the topic of Shibano's book, but what I find the most interesting thing about it is that Shibano explains why many of the strange-looking AI moves work.


I think AI will not have really arrived until they have cracked the real AI challenge: AIs should be able to provide human comments on their own games, explaining to us humans why they work.


It's a side note of course but I disagree. Intelligence can show through articulation but it is not restricted by it. Human experts who are inept at explaining why they know what they know, do exist, in spite of the Feynman principle. Ramanujan is a good example. He "saw" properties of numbers without being able to explain to a(nother) human how he was able to do that. It's very similar to AI Go bots showing us sequences without an explanation. In Ramanujan's case, we had good reason to doubt our own intelligence, not his. In AI's case, why should we do otherwise? We already call it artificial to distinguish the nature of the intelligence.


The point I was trying to make was not about whether the measure of knowledge was the ability to explain it. Rather that as intelligent beings, we--some select few of us, anyway--have created AIs that are supposed to do things better. But don't we want to benefit from them? Many of us don't have access to good human teachers, and some of us, don't do all that well with books. Go (and other) AIs could potentially be evolved to become infinitely patient, inexpensive, and always available teachers to humans. But only if they possess the skills to teach and explain to us, to assess what we need, to create targeted exercises, etc.

So however smart the people who invented Alpha Zero--it plays itself millions or billions of games, kudos to how well it plays, and probably a fine strategy for noble pursuits like curing cancer--but let smart AI developers work on ways that that take us humans along for the ride, giving us better resources and access for improving ourselves.

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Post #19 Posted: Sun Oct 31, 2021 2:11 am 
Oza

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Quote:
let smart AI developers work on ways that that take us humans along for the ride, giving us better resources and access for improving ourselves.


I don't think knotwilg (or anyone else) is disagreeing with this as an aspiration. As I understood it, he was just being more practical about whether it is actually practicable.

Even the cargo-cult believers in go AI have already discovered that bots are not yet capable of making (m)any of us stronger. So they switch to the next tack: it's just a matter of time before AI bots will be able to explain to us what they are doing. Maybe, maybe not.

But an even deeper question that is rarely addressed and never yet answered underlies that: if bots do learn to explain what they are doing, will it make any practical difference?

In a sense we already know certain things they are doing. One is reading to super-deep levels at incredible speed. Allied to that is that they rarely if ever make computational mistakes, or forget things, or have a bad-hair day, etc, etc. No matter how well bots explain all of that in detail, we humans can't in practice match that, and maybe never will even with brain chip implants.

To take what I think may be a more realistic go example. It may be that bots will tell us that the sides, relative to the corners, are rather more important than humans usually assume. There are some grounds for believing that already from human experience. At least it has been noticed that certain humans who know a thing or two about winning at go, such as Honinbo Dosaku, Go Seigen and Fan Xiping, do emphasise the sides more than other other players. Yet despite having been able to make that observation, next to none of these other players have been able to reach their level. The likeliest explanation so far, based on AI matches of their play, is simply that they read deeper than most other players.

If bots end up telling us that, likewise, they are better because they can handle ALL such ultra-complex situations reliably, which is actually several giant steps further on from trying to emulate the baby steps of Go Seigen or Dosaku, surely it is no surprise that some people make a clear distinction between "bots explaining things to us" and "bots explaining things to us we can actually use." How you view that distinction can vary enormously, of course, but it seems useful to many of us at least to make the distinction.

If we look at reasons why some people refuse to acknowledge the distinction, a quasi-religious belief in Mankind may be part of it - as with climate change (Mankind has solved such problems in the past and so will solve them in the future; hey, who turned the lights out?). My own view is that a more likely reason in most cases is simply that certain humans love bling. AI is the ultimate bling accessory.

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Post #20 Posted: Sun Oct 31, 2021 4:59 am 
Judan

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Now Hebsacker Verlag offers the book sent from Germany.

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