Bantari wrote:But as xed_over said - its all about communication and speaking the same "language" - presentation in an of itself is meaningless unless it allows us to communicate or communicate better.
Communication occurs in many different forms, between humans directly (such as talking over a physical board), between a human and a machine (such as a person using go software to study games), between humans but with the interaction mediated by machines (such as people playing go on a server or discussing go in a forum), and even between machines (such as files and data being exchanged between programs, perhaps as part of mediating human interactions).
Having a consistent language is an important part of communication, but actually using a language that is appropriate to the context and facilitates clear/easy communication is perhaps even more important, and in different contexts different languages seem to be preferred. For example, over the board, most people already speak in corner-relative terms (albeit, usually ambiguously unless clarified in context), machines often use SGF which employs an absolute alphabetic system, and players on go servers often use "A1" since most servers/clients tend to label the board that way. Consistency need only be maintained in the context of each separate communication rather than universally. I think forcing a universal system across all of these contexts would only cause more difficulty.
Bantari wrote:Overall, I would say that the ideal to strive towards would be to have a uniform system, accepted everywhere, and used by everyone. Of course, no such system can be the "best" for everybody in every situation, but I think that this is a very minor problem, and the overall advantages would by far outweight it. I think that to have once globally accepted system is a much more desirable situation than having multiple systems for people to choose from. And to be honest, I do not really care which exact system it is - migth be the one you propose.
This is the whole idea behind the concept of "standards", and it is usually accepted as a very good idea.
I believe the primary goal of standardization is to clarify and consistently specify concepts/systems, rather than impose universality. It is rarely the outcome (or even the aim) of a single standardized system to achieve universal adoption. Often, this is simply due to the problem having different contexts that require different solutions, since a good solution is one context may be poorly-suited to another. See the examples discussed earlier.
Bantari wrote:Which brings us the full circle to my initial point: what problem are you trying to solve?
The problem is that the commonly used absolute systems are difficult to use or seem unnatural/counter-intuitive to some players. Corner-relative systems provide a conceptually different alternative that might help address some of these issues. Also, I believe the existing corner-relative systems could perhaps be improved, and hence I proposed some small tweaks upon that idea.
I already mentioned the case of
Pierre Audouard and his motivation to create a similar corner-relative system due to him finding traditional coordinate systems difficult to work with given his vision impairment. Perhaps you overlooked the above remarks, or dismissed the example, but I think it illustrates how a novel coordinate system can greatly aid the communication of board positions, where other systems were not suitable.
Personally, I also struggle with using the absolute coordinate system, since I find it difficult to remember the mappings of letters larger than K. Even the double digit numbers feel awkward as you are essentially counting from the opposite side. Too often, it feels like a distracting waste of time to manually convert in my head or refer to the board labels (if available), since numbers like 15, 16, 17 just don't immediately and naturally map to the 5th, 4th, and 3rd lines. Even if one does get used to mapping these instinctively, one has to start all over (and might even get tripped up) when dealing with other board sizes. The choices for convention (i.e., origin placement and row-column vs column-row) in traditional systems also seem somewhat arbitrary leading to typical first moves being labeled by not easily deciphered coordinates such as "Q16" for hoshi or "4-17" for komoku.
The proposed corner-relative system addresses some of these issues by reducing the letters used to A though K, which are mapped to 1 through 10, and setting convention based on the principle of labeling typical ("polite triangle") first moves using their typical corner-relative terms, e.g., "4-4" for hoshi and "3-4" for komoku. The entire top-right quadrant is simply just labeled relative to the corner using two numbers. In other quadrants, the coordinates are also just the distance from the corner, but one or two letters are instead used to disambiguate which quadrant you are in.
The first coordinate gives the column, which counts from the left if it is a letter, or from the right if it is a number. The second coordinate gives the row, which counts from the bottom if it is a letter, or from the top if it is a number. The CJK symbols offer another alternative if one finds that more familiar or easier to use than the roman letters.
quantumf wrote:Whole board coordinate have not, as far as I can tell, really taken on. People still mostly talk in corner terms (3-4) and then have to rely on other cues to figure out which corner (sometimes explicit, saying "top left", or contextual)
The key aim of the proposal and similar corner-relative systems is to provide a way to unambiguously refer to any point on the board while still retaining familiarity of corner terms. In the proposed system, this is disambiguated by whether letters or numbers are used to specify the point
Bantari wrote:But seriously... if you write software, you can do it however you like ... it is trivial to have a function which recalucates from one coordinate system to another, so each piece of software can do it in multiple ways, its just presentation.
I've made this similar point as well. In a lot of situations, software simply makes the application of different coordinate systems a simple matter of presentation. Additionally, software also makes it a simple matter of translation between two people that prefer different systems. For example, imagine as go server where whenever you reference a point using your preferred system that is being displayed on your client, the server automatically translates the coordinates into the preferred systems of other users as chosen and shown by their client.
Bantari wrote:Its just that its a bad idea. Unless you have good reasons.
Since you seem to strongly think that it is "bad idea", I would be very interested to hear some more specific criticism about the actual proposal. Besides "the cost of numbers-and-letters-mixing which I (and others) find messy", I don't seem to see any other remarks regarding the specific system. It seems that your arguments have mainly focused on a general objection to any alternative coordinate system proposals based on the idea of universality.
