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 Post subject: Bill Spight's Go Theory Research - Books
Post #1 Posted: Tue Jan 18, 2022 11:39 pm 
Judan

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Quotation reference: https://www.lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.p ... 38#p270338

dhu163 wrote:
I would be interested in more details and references as SL only has a few. I'm not sure many more exist though.

We have this page -
https://senseis.xmp.net/?BillSpight

and I saw Bill mentioned writing a book on evaluation somewhere. Has this happened, or did it go into L19+RJ's books?


Temporarily, Bill considered writing an endgame book but gave up on this project when realising that he would not have enough book writing skills. He preferred writing online messages without the duty of a long term project. Given his recent personal development, chances have become even very much smaller that he might ever write a book.

Most of Bill's endgame contribution to Sensei's Library are about topics of combinatorial game theory in the book Mathematical Go Endgames, research papers on combinatorial game theory and, only a bit, his own research on combinatorial game theory. On rec.games.go, Godiscussions.com and L19, Bill did some research (or he and I did some other research together) deeply buried in various threads. Some things are even hidden in clauses of sentences of longer informal messages. Most of such research is now much more clearly represented in my book Endgame 5 - Mathematics. Bill also wrote a few mathematical research papers especially on ko and endgame, which one might read directly (one is only available in a printed maths journal, don't ask me now for its reference) but their theory is mostly reasonably explained in the book Combinatorial Game Theory on the level of advanced mathematical textbooks. Expect to spend weeks to months when trying to understand it even if you have some solid university education at maths. In particular, I still need to work myself through ko thermography.

Most online references to formal endgame theory other than those appearing in maths papers are at Sensei's Library, often have been edited by Bill and mostly refer to the theory of Mathematical Go Endgames and its direct expansions. Now, this only represents a small part of formal endgame theory. Bill has said that most of his own endgame research avoids combinatorial game theory (such as in Mathematical Go Endgames). (However, his greatest research result is / continues from combinatorial game theory.)

Most, or maybe even by far the most, of Bill's non-CGT endgame theory you can now find in my book Endgame 5 - Mathematics and the practical side of it applied in Endgame 4 - Global Move Order, Endgame 3 - Accurate Local Evaluation and a fragment (on corridors) in Endgame 2 - Values. Besides, in these books, Bill's non-CGT endgame theory is represented and explained much better than in L19 messages, which are often unstructured or might be pure maths with little context. I bit myself through all those messages to represent also their contained theory in my books.

There is mostly one exception of a topic, difference games, that I could not explain in my books yet and that you find best represented in Bill's L19 messages because I realised that my fundamental understanding of the relation between CGT outcome classes and difference games is still insufficient.

Although Sensei's Library has lots of pages on endgame theory, of which most were mostly edited by Bill, the SL coverage is mostly limited to combinatorial game theory closely related to that in the book Mathametical Go Endgames. Some such SL pages contain mistakes or make learning theory hard. Mostly importantly, this kind of endgame theory covers only a small part of (the results of) formal endgame theory - the part related to infinitesimals and corridors - and misses most of Bill's research. The book Endgame 5 - Mathematics (and Volumes 3 + 4) hardly explains corridors (see Endgame 2 - Values instead) but covers large and most parts of formal endgame theory, which furthermore you cannot find well explained elsewhere yet because a) there is very much new theory invented in the book and b) Bills' (and parts of my) theory previously only existed in online forum (or sometimes private) messages. For the CGT theory not on SL, see mostly the book "CGT".

If you think that more theory should be explained at more places, you might cover some by retrieving it from the aforementioned books. To start with, the structure of topics of endgame theory needs to be stated and, on webpages, enhanced very greatly.


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