Quote:
the rule of six for ladders - Chapter II of Dunhuang Classic of Weiqi?
I wrote an article at Hangzhou meeting 2016,that explained chapter II in detail.
You had already given your real name tucked away in the threads here, but it is good to have this confirmation. Thank you.
For the benefit of others, I think he is underselling himself. That paper (in Chinese) is massive, about 22 dense pages, and it is about kos as much as ladders. My understanding is that the portion about ladders was not specially new, and not controversial, but this was by far the most detailed and helpful exposition. The portion on kos, however, was entirely new and was a major new contribution. It delves into double kos, triple kos, seki-kos etc. This would be the only part relevant to the rule aficionado, I imagine.
In saying that, I am reflecting mainly the views of others that I solicited at the symposium, though at that point almost no-one had read the full paper. We had only heard, as I recall, a 15-minute slide presentation. I found it hard to follow myself, because the Dunhuang language is unusual and elliptic (in parts, it's almost in shopping-list note form, actually), but the author had helpfully put quite a few passages into modern Chinese.
Because of my personal interests, it was naturally the language that interested me most. In particular I found the discussion of the common-or-garden word 行 especially illuminating. It has variant pronunciations (xing or hang or heng, though different again in ancient Chinese), but I was already familiar with that. What was totally new to me though - and great fun - was a sentence that went something like "Confucian scholars say 权, military men say 奇, but go players say 行." The author showed how they were the same (which is actually quite mind-boggling and I'm not sure I entirely followed the argument). But this term (as he shows) is also relevant to the understanding of 路 and 道.
So, I would say the omens for the present contributions on counting are potentially very good if only we can get to see the full depth of the research behind it, rather than the perhaps misleading snippets here. However, at this stage, looking at it purely linguistically rather than through the prism of rules, I still have to wonder if it's an adventurous step too far. But I await developments with great interest.