Life In 19x19

I'm very glad to see L19 return and I hope people rediscover it. If you have email addresses of users I think it's worth making a one-time email blast pointing to this announcement (or maybe every user who has been active since 2024 or something if you're worried about spamming).

Some other ...

the famous quote often attributed to world chess champion Emanuel Lasker, that if intelligent aliens exist on another planet, the game they would play would be go.
As far as I know it wasn't Emanuel Lasker quoting this, but Edward Lasker , who is only distantly related to Emanuel.
My copy of ...

One issue with automatic translation of text about go is that many of the technical words also have non-technical meanings, and unless the translator is aware of the domain, it will tend to use the non-technical meaning of the word. If you have ever seen an automatic translation talk about "robbery ...

I've never really explored the famous classical Go problem collections. I know that the problem difficulties are all over the place, with some being far far over my head. If I'm doing problems purely to benefit my own study, I'd rather use a curated selection that is intended to be appropriate for ...

I've just read the first five chapters or so but it looks very good so far. My one wish is that a native English speaker had proofread it. It's actually all perfectly fine with the exception of a ton of run-on sentences, which I'm allergic to. (Example: "Black 1 has to be considered as an approach ...

I suspect that this post was the result of misuse of AI tools.

The other main interesting Go thing at the Congress was a series of three lectures that Michael Chen (= Zhaonian Chen = zchenmike) 1p gave on what he considered to be the principles of high-level Go. They came at some essential concepts from a different angle than I'm used to, and whether or not I ...

I'm back from the 2024 US Go Congress in Portland, Oregon, and it was a lot of fun as always. I went 5-1 again (really 4-1 plus a forfeit :mad:), so with my -3.15 AGA rating coming in I must be guaranteed to hit AGA 2k (if I don't, I give up on AGA ratings entirely). Of course I'm happy about that ...

My reading was feeling a little soggy so I took another trip through 1001 Life & Death Problems and the results were unexpected:
9/2022 2/2023 3/2024
Live in 1 84.5% 88.0% 96.0%
Kill in 1 96.5% 96.0% 99.5%
Live in 3 87.5% 93.0% 96.0%
Kill in 3 99.0% 97.0% 99.0%
Live in 5 84.0% 83.0% 93.0%
Kill in 5 ...

Yeah, this one shows up in life and death manuals. I learned it as part of the J-group collection.

I already agreed with the generalities of the original post but I also do agree that the second problem is harder. On the other hand I don't think it's 9 ranks harder!

By the way, over the years I have become quite sensitive to the following stone relationship:
$$B
$$ | . . . , . . . .
$$ | . O O ...

Yeah, that's basically it, in my opinion.

A lot of people don't really read when they do tsumego, especially online when you can be told that you "solved" a problem when all you did was play a few "looks like this might work, let's see what happens next" moves in a row. And we get trained early on ...

Yeah, no books is amazing! He had a video recently where he was gushing over a book ( The Thirty-six Stratagems Applied to Go ), and I think part of the excitement was due to the fact that it was like the second Go book he's ever read.

I don't know about earlier in his journey, but during the last ...

Yes, an early-early 3-3. Take that, AlphaGo, which takes the credit for innovation just like Doetsu (probably) overshadowing Yusen. Remarkably, katago seems to say this is the best move. More remarkably, when the AlphaGo 3-3 hit the headlines, one conclusion drawn was that pros had assumed ...

If these questions are directed at me, I'm afraid I don't know the answers. My recollection was that it was a general principle and not meant as a hard-and-fast rule. (It may even have only been meant to apply to corners.) I don't use the heuristic myself and watched the lecture a long time ago. I ...