I've made an image of the high-dan game network, using the games they played in December 2010. Any comments will be much appreciated.

A link to the image and a short description are at http://senseis.xmp.net/?KGSHighDanGameNetwork

Fun graph. Maybe use some extra colors for different players' lines. Near the center it's less a web and more a giant gray slab with circles on top

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1k KGS

And the ranks seem to be wrong too. For example woodyy is 3d

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Sanity is for the weak.

Nice catch. I fixed that.


I added different shades of grey for the lines. Does it look any better now?

A few more game networks, for 4k, 3k, 2k, 1k, 1d.

http://senseis.xmp.net/?KGSRankedGameNetworks

LOL.. I wanted to look at the picture and just got a white screen, so I thought it diddn't work for me. After having looked more closely I saw that it was just the (empty) top-left corner of this amazing picture. Great job!

Just out of interest as an information specialist (in training): Which programme did you use to analyse the data and make that picture?

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how much games did hoog6 and tamagon play together??? (4k picture)
I don't know how much games they played together but it must be a HUGE amount. there line is almost 10 times wider than any other.

the total games of Yongkey (1k picture) is also very impressive by the looks of it.

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Laurens
Go school: freegame's Teaching School
Author of: The Next Move a book for 15-3kyu players.

139 games between the two of them, apparently. In all but one, hoo6 was black, even though the games were even and hoo6 won a clear majority of them.

Also, yongkey has apparently played over 15,000 games on KGS. I've only played 500. That's insane.

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We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

can you make them on request?
I might be interested in one from one of my accounts

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Laurens
Go school: freegame's Teaching School
Author of: The Next Move a book for 15-3kyu players.

A L19 network would be interesting (including free games)

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Sanity is for the weak.

yongkey is not the champion though. TheCaptain played more. If I had to bet, I would put my money on shui48.


There are many programs and libraries for the social network analysis. The one I used is http://igraph.sourceforge.net/


I can. What do you have in mind?


All I need for that is a list of usernames.

I now really want to see one for L19 ... though I don't think many of us play each other on KGS all that often.

Perhaps a better graph would show connections for people who post in the same threads (instead of playing each other in games) (=

It could show us if L19 is one big community, or several sub-communities.

I just installed the software, but do not have any idea how to imput large amounts of data.
I assume you did not type it in all by hand
Maybe a brief description of how to put in the data would be easier than make graphs for everyone.

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Laurens
Go school: freegame's Teaching School
Author of: The Next Move a book for 15-3kyu players.

Sounds like a very nice idea.
I bet the malkovich part is quite separated from the rest.
although most people who play there are usually people who post a lot in other parts as well.

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Laurens
Go school: freegame's Teaching School
Author of: The Next Move a book for 15-3kyu players.

It would be even better to make a bipartite graph with two kinds of nodes: 1) usernames and 2) thread topics. You need some sort of a binary relation between the nodes to make a social network. People who post in the same thread are not necessarily connected to one another, rather they are connected to the thread.

I would particularly want to see this network done for the old godiscussions forum. Someone just needs to write a little program to harvest the data: a list of thread topics and a list of people who posted in each thread. I will then make the network image easily.

Another idea is a network of quotations. If you make a post that quotes what someone else has written (like I'm quoting Mef here), this constitutes a binary relation which one needs to make a network, a directed network in this case. Again, the problem is to harvest the data.

Yet another idea is to make a network of references for the sensei library. Most pages in the library reference some other pages. This can be used to make a network. I'd really want to see this network too.

Not to tout my own horn, but http://lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=3052 contains some graphs I made showing how often two people post in the same thread. Granted, it doesn't implement your idea of using thread names as nodes, but it's still something.

If you want to make more graphs with the data, you can ask me and I will provide you the raw data I used to generate my graphs. Granted, it doesn't contain thread names for the list of posters in a thread, but it would not be hard for me to modify my parsing script to include the thread name as the first element of each list of posters. Also, due to technical limitations, I could only gather the first twenty posts of each thread, so the data is a bit incomplete. I couldn't find a good solution to download all the pages of a thread or to get all the posts of a thread onto one page for wget.

As for parsing godiscussions.com, that's unfortunately not currently possible, as any thread containing FlashGoban or Go diagrams refuses to load. If we had access to the database that the L19 admins have, then it might be possible.

The senseis library idea does sound interesting. If you or someone else doesn't look into it first, I might look into it on Thursday (my next day where I have free time).

_________________
We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.