Life In 19x19

I'm very thankful to apetresc for bringing L19 back, but I'm not going to be confident in its future until he's not the only person with the ability to manage it.

(Necro-ing this thread after it was pointed to from here )

I learned the "reference position trick" when I saw Ben Mantle use it in a calculation without even calling attention to it. I do think that it's easier than trying to keep track of exactly what rectangle of points is being considered; it ...

Thanks for the comments and your prior work on the subject, Robert. I did read them carefully but I'm not going to respond to them point by point because they are all addressed to my own satisfaction (obviously not yours!) somewhere in the series, and I've learned from experience what happens when ...

One of my Go activities while L19 was down was to work through how to use area counting rather than territory counting to calculate endgame values. I had always guessed that this might be easier than using territory counting because there are fewer things to keep track of, but had never actually ...

My only remaining diagram complaint is that circles on Black stones are very hard to make out. Just making the circles a bit thicker ought to do the trick.

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.