I am absolutely serious. Numbers are unique. Names are not.

I'm not advocating using numbers exclusively, just adjunctively.

For most transactions in this world, you can't get by without an id number. If you register for a go tournament, pay taxes, use a credit card, etc, you have a number attached to your name. Even relatively anonymous transactions have numbers. If I use cash to buy a burger, the clerk may call out my name when it is ready, but my receipt has a transaction number.

( Note that for the purposes of this discussion I take no position on the sociological contention that such behavior is depersonalizing, nor on the political contention that it is big-brotherish. I simply observe that it is efficient. )

We like to think that we live in a world where we can refer to people by names. It seems more natural to us. But underneath the names are often numbers. For example: in the above quote Laman ( L19 user #325 ) quotes me ( user #5 ) when I wrote a post ( #p68295 ) ( alternately post #15 in thread #3878 in forum #13 )

I favor using the names when possible, but having numbers to back it us when the possibility of name confusion arises. ( I'm sure we can find some way to assign a number to Go Siegen if neccesary. )

Joaz (#5)

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I am not a number! I'm a free man!

Best wishes.

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Well if Kim wants to become pro - I assume he does - his goal right now has to be to win this tournament. People who win are much harder to ignore than people who make it to the finals.

I think that if he does win, it would open the whole 'what is a pro' debate up. The easiest solution would be to make him a pro and return to business as usual.

Lee Hajin wrote a little about pro vs amateur on her site here: http://www.starbaduk.com/25358#0

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David

Go Game Guru: Learn Go | How to Get Better at Go | Go Game Shop | Go Boards | Baduk TV

It's not really efficient. A whole stratum of work, investment and resources is necessary to create and maintain a numbering system, and that's assuming agreement (which itself will take a huge amount of time and resources) can be reached. This is massive overkill for a small business like pro go.

From memory, there are only about four cases among current pros where there are pairs having the same name (in English - even fewer in the original languages), and these can also be easily dealt with by the use of Sr. and Jr. or m and f.

Ales Cieply tried to impose a PIN numbering system in his Progor ratings, and he kept it up for a longish time, but he seems to have given up in 2008. The problems he had (and frequently - I know because I had to field most of the questions) were things like an Oriental name being written differently in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, old Japanese, old Chinese or wrongly (Rui Naiwei's name is almost always written wrongly). Whenever he met a name that was new to him, he didn't know if it was a new player or just a spelling he hadn't seen. Often he assumed a new player and made an entry accordingly in the database, only to have to unravel it later once he discovered it was an old player. It's easy to imagine the huge amount of work this takes, and why he eventually grew sick of it.

It would, of course, be possible to give every entry in the GoGoD onomasticon a number, but then there is the question of propagating the system and maintaining it, and all the public would get is a number - to do what with? If you use the onomasticon instead, which works perfectly well with text searches, you get biographical details (often extensive) plus all the variant names recorded. That seems more useful, and so efficient, to me. Having an extra number to go with that would be as useful as a fart in a perfume factory.

Maybe I didn't state it cleary enough. I'm suggesting using already existing numbers generated by the the home organizations, not a new set of numbers invented by an external third party.

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You are number 85.

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I think this numbering business is a great idea, but let's table it until we've reaped the efficiencies of switching to Esperanto, ok?

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Occupy Babel!

And Dvorak keyboards too.

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David

Go Game Guru: Learn Go | How to Get Better at Go | Go Game Shop | Go Boards | Baduk TV

Ha Seong-pong played Yamashita on Monday, July 25th, but could not continue his streak, losing by resignation.

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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

It seems this phenomenon isn't occurring in just Japan; two days ago, Yun Junsang was knocked out of the Myungin preliminaries by amateur Cho Insin.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the merits of a numbering system, and everything to do with a lack of language specific knowledge on the part of Ales. Had Ales chosen to use names instead of numbers, the same issue would have cropped up just as often, and with exactly the same outcome.

Everyone and their mother is using numbering systems everywhere. SSNs, bank accounts, license plates, house numbers, zip/postal codes, phone numbers, etc, etc, etc. There is a good reason for that. It is efficient and prevents errors.

As a database designer and administrator, I cringe when people criticise numbering systems without a good understanding of their purpose in maintaining high quality data.

Of course a database's numerical system need not be anything you use in everyday speech, you might not synchronize it between different databases, both of which seemed to be presumed by Joaz's comment.

American politicians all have unique social security numbers, but we still refer to them by their confusing and non-unique names like Reince Priebus and Barack Obama.

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In my observation, a lot of people just don't listen. It's not that they are deaf, but that they don't listen actively. I have an unusual surname which nobody ever gets right, so I always spell out the six letters. It is not uncommon for me to have to spell it several times while listeners stare in confusion at the paper/computer screen in front of them. I find that this is far less of a problem when I visit non-English-speaking countries, because the listeners expect my name to be foreign and odd, and so actually do listen.

As for your name, John, I guess nobody reads Robbie Burns any more.

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