... I wasn't holding him to that standard. I would just agree that Euclid is pretty brilliant. Robert's work was described as petty and over-fixated on tedious definitions. You, in turn, said that it is no more petty or tedious than Euclid's Elements (which are brilliant!)... my only addition was to point out that Robert uses vastly more, and worse, definitions to prove less.

I think your interpretation of "intersection" is probably sound, but do you see my point? He fills two pages with preliminary definitions of the terms that will be used to define ko, without clarifying whether "sets of intersections" refers to intersections of lines on a board, or intersections of the ideal objects that he has defined. I'm surprised that you can confess to be completely uninterested in defining the ko rule without taking MW's side in this.

Yes.

I use this style for these reasons:
- it allows me to work the fastest in such research papers
- I expect the relatively most go players to understand such a semi-formal style more easily than a purely symbolic annotation (because not every go player is familiar with using nothing but symbols)

I agree: the annotation does not look like maths symbol style.

You are expected to read elsewhere. (Various rules or rules research texts, where such definitions can be found.)



The fascinating thing is: "ko" can be introduced without having to use propositions; definitions suffice!

(Only a few applying propositions so far. Everybody is invited to start more advanced research. Propositions I needed for earlier research on other topics.)

Missing links to well established terms (here: among experts for rules-derived research) are not "incompleteness of presentation". Quite contrarily, the reader should scold himself for not having educated himself to be familiar with the terms. Like, e.g., an advanced math student must already know what a "number" is without getting a link to that term's definition:)

I guess this means that we actually agree. My point was that it is no need for Robert to be ashamed of the fact that he uses vastly more, and worse definitions than Euclid does to prove less than Euclid does. Plenty of people better trained than Jasiek are guilty of the same.
Again, I guess this means that we actually agree on this, too. Jasiek's writing style in the ko paper (I haven't even seen a glimpse of his other works, at least none I can remember. I only scanned this one b/c of its relevance to the conversation) has a lot of room for improvement and he doesn't necessarily follow best practices. However, again, plenty of people better trained than Jasiek are guilty of the same. I am peer-reviewing a paper right now that has similar problems. Granted, I will probably recommend rejection to the editor, but the people who wrote it are far better trained than Jasiek is. The authors of the paper will receive three reports, including mine, that will point out some of these things in addition to comments about the content unrelated to its presentation. The next version of the paper will likely be less flawed. As an amateur working alone, Jasiek does not have access to such resources. It is from that standard I am evaluating him.
Well, I had issues with MW's posts not because he thought ko rules were uninteresting, but rather because he seemed to be intent on incriminating Jasiek's books by association with the ko paper (different products, with different pricing, for different audiences)...and using statements that seemed to reveal to me he hadn't even skimmed it properly.

Also, I find it troubling that many people are demanding that Jasiek distill some 6-7-800 pages of material into a compact form that can convince them that Jasiek's claims are true. Is the value of any major contributions to any theory (not just go) demonstrable in the limited medium that is L19? If the value of the contribution requires several hundred pages to establish, is the author morally obligated to share substantial portions of it to everyone for free if he wants to make claims of its value? I would hope not. What if he shared it with a select few? What if those select few came back and parroted Jasiek? Did we gain any hard knowledge about the truth of those claims? No. We might demand from them the same answers we demanded from Jasiek. In the end, if you want to counter his claims, you should read his books first instead of asking him to do the work for you.

The other alternative is to simply say "I don't believe it, but each to his own" and let it be (or simply ignore his posts altogether). There is no great need to make Jasiek submit to our opinion. Our skepticism about his claims is not discredited by our inability to disprove them without reading his books. The final judgment regarding our skepticism will just remain To Be Decided. We don't have to win every battle and not every battle determines a winner.

Now, I understand that Jasiek inserts himself into many discussions, but have you noticed how he does it? He usually starts by asking questions related to the thread topic that have the possibility of being answered in a way that makes his work relevant. This is somewhat like dipping his toe in the water to check the temperature. By itself this is harmless. Then many of the posters who are supposedly sick of hearing from Jasiek help lead the conversation in the direction that Jasiek wants it to take. That is, they seem to overreact to the dipping of the toe, which actually has the effect of giving perfect public justification for Jasiek to take a cannonball dive into the pool.

Perhaps its annoying that we have to be slightly more careful in constructing our posts in order to avoid engaging Jasiek when we do not want to do so. If we're patient and careful, this is not such a big deal. I don't see why we have to be up in arms about this. This sort of thing is just part of living in society. If you have a friend who just goes on and on about his girl troubles, you avoid the topic as much as possible. We accept this in our non-digital lives as a fact of life. Perhaps we need to exercise the social skills that we know we have online as well as we do offline.

Can you define "ko" so elegantly as apparently Euclid could define something else? Maybe that is possible for an invented artificial abstract game or class of games (with cycles) simpler than go with its multiple rulesets input(!), game ending conditions etc.

Like definitions in my Basic Ko Types paper, I have made the definition about as mighty as useful to make it applicable for different rulesets input (almost regardless of repetition restricting rules, suicide rules, game ending passes, scoring method) and optional history-bans.

The elegance now does not lie in the simplest definition but in the definition-only style and the input modularity.

I do not recall much other go theory research with such flexibility. Much other research needs to be redefined or cloned for each different ruleset. For "ko", I have already done this work in the definition itself.

The direction (and also the thread start) was very unplanned...!

I doubt the mathematical community agrees on the numberness of Arithmetical numbers, Surreal numbers and Supernatural numbers. Leave alone of the symbolic numbers you mention in Joseki volume 2.

we are out of bit saving mode, so in help of the next readers some context.

( underlining by me, cyclops )

This is just general design advice, but creating a self-contained document that presents the terms as needed in a linear way is a tested way of writing texts for newcomers. Your way is fine if you want your readership to be limited by the entry barrier. If you wish to increase it, I suggest that you make the document more self-contained. Do you like web sites that require too many clicks to get to where you want? A document that is not self-contained is somewhat like that. Perhaps you won't do it because there are uses of time that give you higher returns, but all else being equal, self-contained documents are easier for beginners to process (and, more importantly, make beginners more willing to do the processing).
I recommended the use of some symbols (a "sprinkle" if you will). I suppose there is potential for abuse, misuse and overuse, so it is a double-edged sword. It's just my opinion, so do with it what you will.
It seems that your antagonists have a habit of doing what makes you happy, whether you planned it or not. If you call me on it, I won't claim that you did or did not plan it. I don't read minds. But you do enjoy conversations about go theory (EDIT: and western go books), do you not?

Sure. Therefore again I did include "default restriction rules", "strategy", "force", "compatible" etc. at all instead of presuming them as known and starting with "answer-strategy". However, there are limits to boredom; it is simply no fun to define "intersection", "area scoring" etc. in each text afresh.



Rather, I'd translate and comment on each definition in detail for the unsuspecting readers.

The document is already very self-contained, except for the too basic terms defined elsewhere. Have you noticed the many examples and remarks for the various conditions? In a normal maths text, you find no or only a few most trivial examples (here that might be: a ko exists) :)

Control+c, Control+v? There are ways of doing this briefly. How about this? "Read http://xyz first if you don't know what x,y,z are. Otherwise, continue to the next section." Another possibility: "For the definitions of x,y,z search newsgroup news.x.y.z". Yet another: "Not defined here: x (see my earlier work A), y (see my earlier work B), z (see my earlier work B)". Perhaps even writing that much tests the limits of your boredom, but I guess we know a lot about what interests you but very little about what bores you.

It is not a matter of text creation speed but of boredom of a) the author who then has to read (eh, skip) again and again what he has pasted and b) the expert readers.



The text is, first of all, meant for expert readers, and I do not want to bore them to death. One also does not study mathematics by reading texts, in which each of them has references to "binary logic is defined in... set is defined in... annotation is defined in... the used algebra is described in..." It is simply not the way maths texts communicate. They expect readers to be educated or to educate themselves. Often, they even expect the reader to do all the proofs. In comparison, the helps given in my research texts are great luxury.

You need to realise that the research papers have nothing at all to do with ordinary go books. If I should find time to explain the contents of my pure research papers in books, then you can expect what you are asking for, in fact, THEN you can expect MUCH more explanation than that.

This weekend, I read an absolutely beautiful paper On Proof and Progress in Mathematics, by William Thurston, talking about the goals of mathematical research, including substantial sections on the way to present and disseminate results and theories. I recommend that anyone who has any interest in math/science/philosophy read this paper, but in particular, I would love for you to read it Robert.

One way for you to avoid the question of copying pasting and all that is to better organize your website. So for instance, write "this paper contains the proper/complete definition of ko. It depends partially on definitions introduced at [link]". I think this approach is inferior to improving the ko paper itself, but it is perhaps a workable compromise.

As it stands, I am reduced to searching for ko on your website and clicking random links to find what I am interested in.

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Occupy Babel!

Fair enough. Just a passing question: Are there experts working on this topic other than yourself?

The paper starts with an abstract.



To start parsing a website, use its index page:

http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/

There you find links to

GO ( books - teaching - rules - study )

Study

http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/study.html

gives you the easiest access to also non-pure-rules research texts.

I know, I could also improve my webpage, my local file database and, as a result, again my webpage (with more research results). Make a sufficient donation and I do it next week instead of writing the next go book. Otherwise, please understand that my time is limited. E.g., I am already too busy with translating

http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/windows_sec ... ncept.html

into German, for which I need another four hours.

Many Go books are written by ghost writers, not by the professional whose name is on the cover.

From what I read around, the professional usually makes the diagrams. I don't know how much of the rest of the output comes from the ghost writer or the pro.

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a1h1 [1d]: You just need to curse the gods and defend.
Good Go = Shape.
Associação Portuguesa de Go

This page is so sparse that it is more misleading than helpful. It lists only a very small percentage of go terms invented by me.