John Fairbairn wrote:
Elsewhere here there has been a query on counting kos, and there has also been a little flurry of activity with book reviews. These two things prompted me to start this thread. It may well run into the sand, but if it doesn't it will probably prove valuable as a joint effort.
Excellent idea, John.
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The background first. There are several ways to count boundary plays (yose). Except perhaps for those gifted with an affinity for numbers, the normal presentations range from awful to very, very awful. There are miai and deiri, terms for which a Japanese-English dictionary is little help (that's because they are technical accountancy terms). Miai has the extra problem of being associated with miai (nuff said!). When you use one and not the other, and why, is a mystery worthy of the tarot card aficionados. None of the presentations represent exactly what pros use - there are enigmas and variations, although deiri and miai will usually provide the basic beat. Mathematicians have their own take - CGT - which comes with an implicit elf'n'safety warning: don't try this at home. Some of us have ignored the warning and still bear the scars.
For non-ko situations (and for many ko situations), CGT, miai counting, and Absolute Counting (TM) give the same results.
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But every game of go has boundary plays, and so it is clearly a very, very important topic. So important that a pro will normally reckon to gain back about 40% of the value of handicap stones in this phase of the game. For us amateurs, a tiny improvement in your counting can save you five points a game instantly - half a stone! Kerchinggg!
I agree.
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The only problem is, all this miai and deiri stuff gets in the way. Gedoingggg!
I would say that deiri gets in the way. It has its uses, but people tend to think about deiri values as if they were miai values. That does not work.
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What to do? Well, O Meien has addressed the problem in a book called Boundary Plays - Absolute Counting. I thought we might look at this book in some detail, over a longish period.
Excellent!
A little background of my own: I introduced the terms, miai counting and deiri counting on rec.games.go several years ago to counter the confusion caused by deiri counting, which was all most Western go players knew about. The trouble is that most of them thought that if you play a gote with a (deiri) value of 2 points, that you gain 2 points. You do not. You gain only 1 point, which is the miai value. Unfortunately, the new terms seemed to generate some new confusion, or perhaps they simply revealed previously hidden confusion.
After reading O Meien's book, I stopped referring to miai counting, and I thought that introducing a new term, Absolute Counting, might not be helpful, either, I simply started talking about how much moves gain. (To be precise, we should ask how much they gain on average.)
O Meien's book also represents a step forward in terms of another term that has caused much confusion, double sente. He does not evaluate double sente at all. In fact, he does not evaluate sente, but reverse sente. That is eminently correct, as it is reverse sente that gains something. (Remember the proverb, Sente gains nothing. Technically, it does gain something, but that something is not some number of points. Playing sente is like cashing a check. You get what is "rightfully" yours.
)Many thanks to John for excerpting this book for a Western audience.
). 
without getting captured). Oh well, it's beside the point, but it caught my eye.
I especially like that you want to encourage people to discuss. I admit, though, I'm more of a Tigger than an Eeyore ...