I read the following text from an interview (with Cho Seokbin).

http://361points.com/choseokbin/




I wanna know your valuable opinion.

Simply obvious.

Opening develops time by time. There are still joseki variations not completely evaluated or discovered. The opinions upon a partucular opening position is likely to differ by pros, and even more by times.

While in tactical fighting, there are usually few good moves to follow. The answers of classic tsumegos does not change.

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Wait, please.

Sounds like we are going over the theory of HNG and why Sai learns modern go but plays with ancient strength.

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

Ancient games are easier to study than modern games in part because there are shorter. For many games, we only know the first 150-200 moves or so. Others were simply left unfinished because the classical players were notorious escapers.

This advantage is rarely pointed out.

I remember a conversation a couple of years ago but have forgotten who it was with - one or another of the pros we study with on Saturdays. The context was the ever-recurring topic of Japan's poor performance in international events. He (that much I know) said that 'Cho and the rest' (meaning at that time Cho U, Iyama, Yamashita, and so on) are clearly better than the previous generation (Cho Chikun, Kobayashi, Kato, etc.) in their understanding of Go. And that the poor results internationally were due to Korea and China leap-frogging Japan rather than any decline in Japan.

In a similar vein, in a recent discussion of Iyama it was clear that other pros are not waiting for any of the other current big names to dethrown him. Interest has already turned to who among the next generation will/can pull it off, if anyone - Ichiriki Ryo, Yu Zhengqi, or someone else?

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

The question is not whether modern pros are stronger or would beat their ancient counterparts, but rather whether it is worthwhile to study the classics or not. One reason that it makes sense for top pros to do so is that it offers them a context in which to evaluate and understand modern moves. This is similar to modern artists, who aren't just willy-nilly making incomprehensively ugly works, but rather are reacting to and building upon centuries of tradition. To quote the Spanish philosopher George Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

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Patience, grasshopper.

There are plenty of pros who do believe in the study of old games. Kobayashi Koichi, for example, puts an eloquent case for studying Honinbo Sansa in Fukui Masaaaki's book on Sansa and Nakamura Doseki. He rubbishes the idea of looking through the joseki prism and instead urges us to look at the qualities that brought players to the top (e.g. he highlights Sansa's tenacity). Fukui himself wryly illustrates how joseki ideas of even players as ancient as these, ideas once unthinkingly dismissed, have recently come back into fashion - Kobayashi too makes the point about openings being to do with fashion.

Against that, I have never been impressed by the way Japanese pros ritualistically and without explanation trot out the names of Dosaku and Shusaku as models to follow. To me this just PR all pros are taught to utter for the fans and doesn't amount to much more than the football coach's "it's a game of two halves".

In the end it is down to personal preference, but I have been struck by elements of this same debate in chess. In chess I think the debate is even stronger, because openings carry much greater weight and because there are many more strong countries where fans root for their own past champions. But what I've noticed is that even strong grandmasters tend to think modern players are clearly stronger until they themselves reach a certain point, such as becoming world champion themselves, and (perhaps because with their new eminence they are asked to write books with games of old masters, whom they now see with fresh eyes) they say they suddenly realise that some ancient was better than them all, or at least deserving of much more respect than generally accorded nowadays. I infer what is happening is that they have suddenly realised that top ancient players reached the top because they saw into the soul of chess in a way that only other top players can see. Kobayashi would fall into this category, of course, but few other pros could. This also squares with the wisdom of the ancients. Recall that the whimsical ancient name for a Meijin was rushen (entering into the divine), which was an allusion to the Book of Changes, where it is explained as "When we minutely investigate the nature and reason of things till we have entered into the inscrutable and spirit-like in them, we attain to the largest practical application of them; when that application becomes the quickest and readiest, and all personal restfulness is secured, our virtue is thereby exalted." On that same basis, i.e. using the 9-dan to 1-dan titles of Emperor Xiao Yan's go academy, a mere journeyman pro is, depending on his actual grade 8- to 5-dan, merely "basking in the illumination" [of the Meijin], "has all the aspects" [but not the soul], "is well versed in the deep and remote" [but hasn't mastered them] or "is practising his knowledge".

By contrast we even lower grades (4- to 1-dan) "indulge in petty tricks", "fight with bodily strength", "act like fools" or "are content with being unskilful". Since this unnervingly accurate portrayal is from the 6th century, I'm not sure we can easily claim to have progressed much over the past 1500 years.



This is almost totally false. It's true that certain players avoided playing certain opponents altogether, but almost all unfinished games known are quasi-ceremonial games at promotion parties, New Year parties, and the like. There were a few notorious incidents (rather than players), such as Shusai doing this in China, but it was for political reasons and in fact he was known as the Fighting Mejin because he was the only 9-dan to put himself on the line and play in the original Oteai (giving handicaps, to boot). What did sometimes happen, though, was a kind of sandbagging: White might feel he had a big edge in a ceremonial game and, relying on his status, might decide to play it out.

Good one! I cannot imagine where I would "recall" this from other than some other of JF's posts or books. So which one was it in?

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

Pretty sure this was a joke. One bad thing about the Internet is the death of written humor without emoticons.

Anyway, Snorri, bravo, your joke wasn't missed by all!

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- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

As an aside, someone actually translated some ancient guqin music into English with western music notation. Which is really tough, because they didn't even have scales or rhythmic notation. I'm so stoked about adding these melodies to my blues licks.

http://chwolfenbloode.co.uk/2011/09/02/ ... the-guqin/

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_Rw3lDZ39Bo

This sounds plausible. But I also wonder if when you reach the top, your attention is distracted: half of you worries about fending off challengers, half of you worries about your legacy, and you start comparing yourself to those older players and seeing them as your competition.

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Occupy Babel!

I can't say whether in chess computer analysis of historical players is well regarded amongst grandmasters, but some researchers are starting to do it anyway. See, for example, the references in this article:

Computer Evaluation of the best Historical Chess Players

One 2006 study really liked Capablanca:

Computers choose: who was the strongest player?

I'm sure engines will continue to improve and be used for this purpose, and their evaluations may change over time. I really like some of the charts in the above article comparing the complexity of the games of say, Tal or Steinetz as compared to Capablanca. Of course, their opponents also have some effect on whether a game is simple or complex.

Although I personally admit knowing little about chess, I think the computer analysis seems to punish complexity unduly. Seeking complexity can increase one's own blunders, for sure, but it can also increase the blunders of the opponent. If in the game, your opponent makes more or bigger blunders than you, you are more likely to win. Therefore, comparing against some kind of ideal play may not be the best metric in judging human strength.

"I don't need to outrun the bear. I just need to outrun you..."

In any case, we may see a time when computers can be used in speculative analysis about the strength of go players.

That does seem like a glaring defect in the analysis, to not take into account competent opponents "forced" blunder rate in addition to their own blunder rate, thereby skewing the results towards simple games.

There used to be a school of thought in chess training that you should study the old masters first and work your way up through the modern masters. You will still hear some top players (e.g., Kramnik, Kasparov) refer to "chess culture," which I take to be a reference to studying the history of the game in such a manner.

As I understand it, the theory of the approach was that the ideal development of an individual chess player was similar to the development of chess players in general. An "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" kind of thing. When you are starting out, it is most important to learn about attacking and sacrificing and the power of the initiative because these are matters that can decide the game for (or against) you quickly. As a friend of mine used to say: "You can't argue with mate." So you study the games of Anderssen and Morphy and you see a lot of gambit play and you start to get a sense of these things. Then you can move on to some of the early strategists (Steinitz, for example), and start to learn some basic positional principles and defensive technique. At a certain point in your development it becomes important to study the games of Capablanca; a little later, maybe you need to look at Alekhine. And at some point, you simply must spend some time studying Rubinstein's games if you want to be really strong. And so on....

I believe that this approach was fairly prevalent in the Soviet Union at one point. I don't know if it is still used today. Modern chess training tends to be dominated by the computer.

The problem with historical approaches is that while they tend to work when there are clear cessions of power which may be true for Chess, when there are different view points and events it is difficult to trace thread of dominance. While the Egyptians were building giant edifices of their power, the Chinese were building a thousand mile canal that connected Beijing to Guuangzhou, mean while Europeans rafts weren't half as developed as the Polynesians flotilas, who most likely had already been to the New World and back one or more times. Sure the victor writes the history, but when there was little overlap in influence, the historical approach doesn't help much.

Go history isn't quite so linear, a prime example of this is Go Seigen's arrival on the Japanese scene, where he was probably unimpressed by the Shusaku Fuseki. Even today it is difficult to trace the world Champion in Go, and the new developments aren't so much a response to challenges from other top level contenders, but from internal dojo pressure, like Lee Changho losing to the twelve year old, however Korea overall isn't competing as well in international tournaments.

By the by, I don't think the Chinese were building their canal while the Egyptians were putting up their pyramids - they had to wait a couple of millennia just to start and another couple of millennia in order to finish - and in Hangzhou not Guangzhou surely? Also Go Seigen was so unimpressed by the Shusaku fuseki that he flattered it by frequent imitation.

But the main point here surely has to do with why we go back to the examples of the past. There are some purely practical reasons in go that have already been mentioned (more collections of games of old players exist, they have attracted many commentaries, they form a common pool that everyone can discuss, etc). But there are also more abstract reasons, such as the one I mentioned earlier (?in this thread) about what Kobayashi Koichi saw in the games of Honinbo Sansa. Rather than the trivial aspects of joseki and fuseki styles, he learnt rather from Sansa's tenacity.

Similarly, in a book I was reading just yesterday, Yoda Norimoto (another truly world-class player) was explaining why he spent so much time in his teens and twenties studying the games of Yasui Chitoku. Although many people praise Chitoku for his totally ungaudy style that supposedly has the quality of tarnished silver, Yoda said he was interested instead in a much deeper question: how could Chitoku make moves like that and still win? And so he came to appreciate eventually that what underlay Chitoku's go was "self confidence". It was this that Yoda took away from Chitoku and helped forge his own style (and character).

I would contend that Kobayashi and Yoda were not going back to the past for trivial reasons such as having easy access to collections. And certainly not for nostalgia. Rather they were going back to people who had already proven they were able to get to the top of the pile, and they were looking not at their josekis and fusekis but at the human qualities which led to their success. Only then did they look at specific moves that best illustrated those qualities. In short, they were not following any old recipe, but a recipe for success. Their own success was thus built on the shoulders of Sansa and Chitoku.

There are actually very, very few players in the tiny world of go who have ever reached the top of the pile. One or two per generation, so fewer than ten a century? And they tend to be dead already. Furthermore, I would contend that the successful human qualities would tend to become easier to see in the more mature games of these players, and that knowing the context of a player's life (i.e. go history) would be helpful in eliciting his human qualities. Both factors point towards using collections of historical players.

honestly, I don't know where you come up with such nonsense

Personally, I think there are some good reasons to study old masters. Because why do we study Go at all? To get stronger, sure, but also because we have a deep appreciation for the game, we see its beauty. And old games can have a lot of beauty. They are certainly worst studying, if for no other reason than that.

But there is also a more pragmatic reason. It is true that a lot of the shapes, joseki, and fuseki from the old games are not popular anymore, some might even be seen as inferior today. So simply imitating them might not be the best thing to do. But how about ideas? I think the ideas in the old games are, by and large, still very valid today. And what's more, they are much easier to learn since they tend to be much more straight-forward. Today, pros often try to increase the complexity of their ideas to get the upper hand. I have a feeling that in the older days this was not always the case, and the ideas were much closer to the surface - and thus much easier to learn and follow. And then you can see many of the very same ideas, often in a more complex form, in the games of modern pros.

So personally, I find a lot of value in study of old games.
But of course, if you are only looking for patterns and moves to mimic, you might have a different point of view and older games might not be suitable.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

The thing I enjoyed most from reading your biography of Shuei was reflecting upon the interpersonal mistakes and growth over his lifetime. I was happy to take a few tidbits away for myself.

"Go is characterized by enormous flexibility." -Yuan Zhou

When studying professional games by the "guess the next move" method, it can be easy to get complacent. After a certain period of time you get familiar enough with the popular lines that not much seems particularly surprising.

What is surprising to me when I go back and look at classical games is how poorly I am able to predict moves. It's not just a matter of not being as familiar with the older josekis---it's more than that. In some cases I think that the players simply had a different approach to the game, and it shows that there is more than one way to play high-level go. In fact, there may be as many ways as there are players.

For me, I feel it's important to see something different every time I think I understand something, just to remind myself how broad go is and how deep the gaps in my understanding are.