I'm not sure what section to post this in, but I'm guessing the right sort of people pay attention to this one, so...

I'm working on collecting some new data for my website, and I need an easy-to-apply definition of "tenuki". Anyone care to take a shot?

Bonus points for defining all your terms.

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Tenuki means to play somewhere else.



Like sente and gote, tenuki depends on the concept of locality. Towards the end of the game, it is possible to define independent regions of the board (except for ko fights, OC), and then tenuki is clear. Early on, however, regions of the board are seldom completely independent. Then what is considered tenuki is fuzzy. If a play is tactically related to the last play, it is not tenuki, no matter how far away it is on the board. If it is not tactically related, it is tenuki, no matter how close it is.

When you think about it, it is surprising that there is as much agreement as there is about what is tenuki and what is not.

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A good tenuki is the go equivalent of removing someone's chair just as he is starting to sit down.

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I'd view it more as leaving the room just as the other person sits down....

Although, in the strict sense, it depends on defining "local", there are (in my new book) pretty good criteria of conditions when playing elsewhere is attractive. Conditions such as this: "The set of local groups is stable."

Now, I propagate that the player chooses(!) what to consider as groups or belonging to a set of local groups. Hence locality can be derived from those given groups. Well, in principle. In practice one also needs some convention of how to form a local enviroment around a known, given group. E.g., the group plus all its liberties and maybe plus further (empty) intersections "in between". We get a locale. Playing outside the locale is then considered a tenuki.

(Everything needs to be updated every move.)

in korean.."hand out" which = not answering opponent's move.

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No, in a way, that's an exact opposite: that's a tesuji.

Obviously nothing is tenuki, there's just one 19x19 board and everything affects everything else!

Nah, it is very useful to speak in terms of tenuki, as much as it is useful to speak of sente. We just need to remind that sometimes global relations are so strong that then using either word might be a mistake. Similarly, local can sometimes become global, e.g. when a string occupies 359 intersections to create a whole board life.

It is also not necessary to enhance a locale to a global scale because of a ladder or a ko. Rather one can express things with locale plus side conditions (like the existence of a specific ladder). Then the ladder breaker (if at a distance) is "played elsewhere".

Indeed.



Therein lies the problem with translation. A more "algebraic" translation of tenuki would be omit to play. However, that is awkward English, and might be confused with a pass. It is also not precise. Play elsewhere is more precise, but, as you indicate, Robert, might be confused with a ladder breaker. A ladder breaker is not tenuki, but if elsewhere is interpreted merely in terms of distance, could be considered to be a play elsewhere.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Not really. The Japanese is a noun not a verb. The verb usage is te wo nuku or tenuki suru. More important, it means skipping a move. The point is (under the Japanese definition), it occurs when you do not respond to a threatening move just played by the opponent. Playing ine one area and ending in sente then playing somewhere else is not a tenuki. There is a sense of bravado in a tenuki, as in the proverb "if it's only worth 15 points, tenuki" (or variations on the number).

The ideal definition would also take account of the Japanese santenuki, which means skipping three moves when you only skip two

Also forget not that the word is common in ordinary Japanese. There the main idea is that some crucial steps have been omitted (i.e. nothing to do with going elsewhere). E.g. the Japanese for "you get what you pay for" is "yasumono wa tenuki ga shite aru".

I am not that great a fan of distance. Rather what I have wanted to say is "belonging to a locale (suitably chosen local set of intersections)" versus "not belonging to a locale". (We do the same in calculating (endgame) counts: we choose a locale in which points are compared and counted.)

I think, in English this is "ignore a threat" rather than "play elsewhere". So maybe Japanese and English tenuki differ in meaning.

good luck applying the above discussion to an automated data extractor (i guess your goal is to determine if a move is tenuki from a local joseki or not for your joseki db)

Seriously an interesting thing is that a ladder breaker is not really tenuki .. but checking the status of all ladders to determine if the move was a ladder breaker.. good luck ...

can a distance argument be used (apart form the ladder breaker issue)? ie a move a knight move away from the developing joseki is NOT tenuki.

But then you have to add to the "active" stones of the current joseki all that comes within this distance of the move played .. do i make sense ?

rephrasing my own thoughts:

you define a cut off distance D (which i propose to be of the order of the knight move or large knight move) and a set of stones that are part of the joseki. (at the start there is only the first stone in that set)
each time a stone is played less than this distance D , this is part of the joseki and it is added to the "active stones" set .
In addition, you add to the "active stones" each stone that become closer to the cut-off distance D as a result of the new play (so, a middle hoshi stone will be integrated to the active stone set if the joseki develop in that direction: thus a shoulder hit or a contact on this middle hoshi stone is not tenuki anymore)
ie (not saying the sequence is smart here just an example )

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$c at a is not tenuki but at b it is
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . b . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . a . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . 1 . 4 . 6 . X . . . . . X . . . |
$$ | . . . . 3 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ ---------------------------------------[/go]

if you want to have an algo you have to use distance in some way or other.

in addition to cut off distance you should also take into account distance to other groups of course

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@dts:
Out of curiosity, and if it is not secret, how does your current tenuki detection algo work today ?

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In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

Thanks everyone, some comments:



Actually, it's very similar to what you outlined. There were ...a few tweaks to get it to behave reasonably. The algorithm you suggest has a potential problem when joseki are played out late in the game and happen to come near another stone which is near another stone which is near... etc.



Thank you for that, I've been using the word wrong (surprise). It seems it is related to what a pro said to me after a simul game, "Why didn't you answer me?" Perhaps I'll switch to using the phrase "non-local" or "played elsewhere" or some such.



This is the sort of thing I was hoping for... except I think this may be computationally infeasible for my purposes. I'm not even sure there's a known solution for determining the set of local groups.




This is a great definition for a human, but "tactically unrelated" is not easy to translate into an algorithm.

-----

Perhaps I should have said a bit more originally on what I'm trying to do-- I potentially need to answer this question several hundred times per move per pro game, in all 65,000+ pro games of GoGoD. I only build my database occasionally, so it doesn't have to be super fast, but it does need to complete in my lifetime. So, basically I'm hoping for a definition that could be applied with reasonably accurate results by a 35kyu...

-----

Alright, well, I'm not sure what I'll end up doing, but a related question: I have considered giving an "urgency" rating to each position, which would be basically "when this position appears in pro games, how many moves on average pass before the players play locally again? So 0.0 would indicate that pros always play locally immediately, and larger numbers indicate less urgent positions (pros play N moves elsewhere before coming back to this position). Does this seem like an worthwhile metric?

Thanks for the input

_________________
That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
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My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

Set a purpose, then we determine the local groups. E.g., a purpose might be, given a particular string, determine all existing strings of which each considered alone can be connected to the string. Then we take the intersections of the string and those strings as our locale. (For other purposes, other definitions are possible, of course.)



It is easy but finding an algo with a sufficiently low computational complexity might be the essential problem.



You can find a presumably simpler one in Joseki Vol. 2 Strategy, ch. Unrest Model. It distinguishes the unrest levels 0, 1, 2 and greater than 2. No fractions and no pro game databases are needed.

just went on dailyjoseki and i had the position that i tried to reproduced in my earlier post but did not exaclty remenbered:

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$c
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . 5 . . . . . W . . . . . . b . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . W B . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . 1 . 4 . 6 9 X . . . . . X . . . |
$$ | . . . . 3 2 . . 7 . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ ---------------------------------------[/go]

here the marked stones are not in the joseki and appear after and before ... which is weird ..

I agree that for late joseki you risk having the whole board as a local group. which is not good.
M
You can add (proably did it already) a cutoff wit the distance to the starting move or the quadrant / half board where the action takes place in. maybe here the 3 stones are considerd as tenuki because the play are on the middle of the board ? maybe This limit should go a little further than the middle of the board considering this example ?

another idea:
Maybe you can infer something by comparing games with the same joseki with each other (the approach here is purely within one game whereas each joseki happend at least 3 times in your db) ie if the joseki here happens only when there is a stone at K4 or around then this stone is definitly part of this joseki pattern even if it was there before and any contact move on it are part of the sequence.



i dont know if its worth it too you but can you extract the other games with this pattern ? are they many without the marked exchange (if all games have this echange then it is also an hint that it is part of the sequence regardless of the local context of teh games)


and maybe just drop examples where there are too many adjacent big groups ?
maybe in that case the joseki variation would be too specific to be useful out of context ?

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In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

That's fine (and I am interested in picking up a copy of your book, is it available in the US?), but I want to actually measure things, as opposed to theorize about them (IOW, we almost certainly have different purposes here). Assuming I write my code correctly, a measurement would not be subject to errors of opinion (I would be very surprised if you have a procedure such that a 30 kyu could come up with the same "unrest level" that you would for a given position). I'm asking whether the urgency measurement I described would be useful.

I'm not sure what all is involved in your "unrest level", but if it's a comparable figure this could possibly be a test for it. (i.e., how well does it model pro play?) Which may or may not be something you care about.

@perceval, I'm still thinking about your post...

_________________
That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
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My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

Just to explain this real quick: the marked stones suddenly appear because in all 8 games where black played (the bad shape) 9, those stones were already on the board.

Although, I find white's reported next move very odd:

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
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My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com