Honinbo Squeezed

[Elom0]

It will be reduced to a 16 player knockout and 5 game three hour per player final. Quite drastic. It will become 5th in prize money ranking losing 70% of it's winners prize. https://www.nihonkiin.or.jp/news/releas ... um=twitter

[kvasir]

At first I doubted it but then I checked it with google translate

Is it that Iyama won one too many times? Broke the camel's back.

[Elom0]

At first I doubted it but then I checked it with google translate

Is it that Iyama won one too many times? Broke the camel's back.

Two days ago I wrote to them to invite the most popular pro 최정先生 and 조해연先生 into the 本因坊戦. They should invite Korean women pros and then find a Korean sponsor to pay for the two-day games. However the silver lining this is it will mean the top Japanese players are more likely to participate in international tournaments.

[John Fairbairn]

However the silver lining this is it will mean the top Japanese players are more likely to participate in international tournaments.

This news was preceded by an announcement that Go Weekly will cease publication in the later summer. The reasons given were centred around life-style changes in Japan, with fewer people reading paper, and of course just doing other things. The bling of the internet has attracted most blame, but lifestyle changes caused by Covid and the subsequent work-from-home craze have also had a big impact worldwide. And teachers everywhere are reporting shortened attention spans among their charges.

In several countries, too. I sense, too, that AI has killed off much interest for the sort of less committed go fans who might buy newspapers and books. Scaling back sponsorship is no surprise given the hard times newspapers and publishers have had. What is very surprising is the huge scale of the scaling-back. This hints at wider and bigger problems so we may expect more such announcements. Even just within Japan, the impact on the Kansai Ki-in must be much bigger than that on the Nihon Ki-in. And who would want to venture into running a go club in Japan nowadays? Or even become a pro? There will always be the equivalent of chess bums, I suppose, but it is easy to envisage a day soon when go in Japan will no longer be treated as a respectable profession, at least by parents guiding their children into careers.

Japanese professionals will not be able to switch to international events. They need invitations. Otherwise, they need to qualify through preliminaries and in several cases they have to pay their own travel and accommodation in these preliminaries.

Korea has had a very patchy sponsorship record. Few companies stay the course and they don't put in anything like the money that has been put into Japan. Hence, so many Korean pros playing in China.

But China has its own economic go problems, as Ke Jie keeps reminding us.

All in all, a depressing day. The same issues have been killing off this forum for some time, so we have very few mourners even!

The only possible upticks I see on the horizon are the 100th anniversary of the Nihon Ki-in next year (if it survives that far!) and the possibility that someone like Sumire might win a major title. But even those kinds of events are nine-day wonders.

[Elom0]

However the silver lining this is it will mean the top Japanese players are more likely to participate in international tournaments.

This news was preceded by an announcement that Go Weekly will cease publication in the later summer. The reasons given were centred around life-style changes in Japan, with fewer people reading paper, and of course just doing other things. The bling of the internet has attracted most blame, but lifestyle changes caused by Covid and the subsequent work-from-home craze have also had a big impact worldwide. And teachers everywhere are reporting shortened attention spans among their charges.

Are you talking about when they cited the cease of publication of Go weekly as a reason?

In several countries, too. I sense, too, that AI has killed off much interest for the sort of less committed go fans who might buy newspapers and books. Scaling back sponsorship is no surprise given the hard times newspapers and publishers have had. What is very surprising is the huge scale of the scaling-back. This hints at wider and bigger problems so we may expect more such announcements. Even just within Japan, the impact on the Kansai Ki-in must be much bigger than that on the Nihon Ki-in. And who would want to venture into running a go club in Japan nowadays? Or even become a pro? There will always be the equivalent of chess bums, I suppose, but it is easy to envisage a day soon when go in Japan will no longer be treated as a respectable profession, at least by parents guiding their children into careers.

Japanese professionals will not be able to switch to international events. They need invitations. Otherwise, they need to qualify through preliminaries and in several cases they have to pay their own travel and accommodation in these preliminaries.

Korea has had a very patchy sponsorship record. Few companies stay the course and they don't put in anything like the money that has been put into Japan. Hence, so many Korean pros playing in China.

But China has its own economic go problems, as Ke Jie keeps reminding us.


All in all, a depressing day. The same issues have been killing off this forum for some time, so we have very few mourners even!

I'm going to write to LG and the Cholsun Ilbo to spread their integration preliminaries across different countries, with integration preliminaries with two places each in Japan and China, and on with one place in Taiwan. A pro from any country can play in any integration preliminary.

I think the Hobinbo and Meijin should find a Korean co-Sponsor and do a deal where Korean women pros are allowed to participate. Lotte is a Korean-Japanese company.

[xela]

I sense, too, that AI has killed off much interest for the sort of less committed go fans who might buy newspapers and books.

I find it hard to understand this mentality. The invention of the motorbike did not kill off athletics. People still get surprisingly excited by the fact that one person can run faster than another person, even if a machine can outdo all of the people. Closer to home, AI didn't kill off chess. If anything, AI analysis has enriched the game. (Not that chess is exactly looking healthy these days. But for other reasons.)

I think there's a few different things going on at once. Hard to tell how much is AI, how much is other go-specific or Japan-specific factors, how much the general decline of the human race (if that's a thing)...

[John Tilley]

Japanese Newspaper circulation is dropping.See:

http://yoshizuka.com/index.php/2021/09/ ... on-copies/

The Mainichi has the smallest circulation of the three major daily Japanese papers - Yomiuri (Kisei), followed by Asahi (Meijin) and then the Mainichi (Honinbo).

The newspaper sponsored titles seem to have been around for ever - the Honinbo tournament was announced by the Mainichi in June 1939, just after Shusai retired. Times are changing.

John Tilley

[gowan]

However the silver lining this is it will mean the top Japanese players are more likely to participate in international tournaments.

This news was preceded by an announcement that Go Weekly will cease publication in the later summer. The reasons given were centred around life-style changes in Japan, with fewer people reading paper, and of course just doing other things. The bling of the internet has attracted most blame, but lifestyle changes caused by Covid and the subsequent work-from-home craze have also had a big impact worldwide. And teachers everywhere are reporting shortened attention spans among their charges.

In several countries, too. I sense, too, that AI has killed off much interest for the sort of less committed go fans who might buy newspapers and books. Scaling back sponsorship is no surprise given the hard times newspapers and publishers have had. What is very surprising is the huge scale of the scaling-back. This hints at wider and bigger problems so we may expect more such announcements. Even just within Japan, the impact on the Kansai Ki-in must be much bigger than that on the Nihon Ki-in. And who would want to venture into running a go club in Japan nowadays? Or even become a pro? There will always be the equivalent of chess bums, I suppose, but it is easy to envisage a day soon when go in Japan will no longer be treated as a respectable profession, at least by parents guiding their children into careers.

Japanese professionals will not be able to switch to international events. They need invitations. Otherwise, they need to qualify through preliminaries and in several cases they have to pay their own travel and accommodation in these preliminaries.

Korea has had a very patchy sponsorship record. Few companies stay the course and they don't put in anything like the money that has been put into Japan. Hence, so many Korean pros playing in China.

But China has its own economic go problems, as Ke Jie keeps reminding us.

All in all, a depressing day. The same issues have been killing off this forum for some time, so we have very few mourners even!

The only possible upticks I see on the horizon are the 100th anniversary of the Nihon Ki-in next year (if it survives that far!) and the possibility that someone like Sumire might win a major title. But even those kinds of events are nine-day wonders.

Chess has been suffering the consequences of the superiority of computers for a longer time than go has so we might draw some ideas from the experience of chess when thinking about go. One thing I notice is the decline of what in chess circles is known as classic tournaments and matches. Classic refers to long time limits, as have been traditional in particular in world champion matches. Consider the most recent chess world championship match between Caruana and Carlsen, which had a fixed number of "classic" games and, when the results of those were tied, the championship was decided by rapid games. Sponsors want viewers to be entertained by the games and the matches. Few people want to watch a go game for hours over two days. What is the viewership of the streamed two-day match games? At least with streaming people with short attention spans can interrupt watching and return after refreshing themselves. Even though it appears participation in chess seems to be healthy compared to go, it is still small compared to competitive football basketball, and baseball. As for baseball, in the USA there is some problem with public interest in the sport; tinkering with the rules of play is taking place in the form of pitch clocks to make the pace of the game quicker and thereby attract more watchers.

[jlt]

The game of go will not disappear. We just have many additional sources of information (websites, videos, forums,...) so that people read less printed material. It doesn't mean they stop reading books and magazines completely.

[CDavis7M]

I sense, too, that AI has killed off much interest for the sort of less committed go fans who might buy newspapers and books.

I find it hard to understand this mentality. The invention of the motorbike did not kill off athletics.

I first discovered Go through an article in 2009 talking about how computers were so bad at playing it, and the research being done to advance AI play. The fact that even AI could not beat humans intrigued me.

With AI first beating humans there was plenty of news about Go. But now AI seems mainstream in the news. Go AI is old news. Perhaps AI is so prevalent that Go no longer attracts players from that circle.

[CDavis7M]

The newspaper sponsored titles seem to have been around for ever - the Honinbo tournament was announced by the Mainichi in June 1939, just after Shusai retired. Times are changing.

I very much appreciate the Newspapers for their sponsorship, but Shuwa was the last Honinbo and times had already changed after him. If times change again I think it will be OK. Nothing lasts forever.

[Elom0]

Instead of being a best-of-5 of single day games it should be a best-of-3 of two-day games. What does everyone think?

[kvasir]

Instead of being a best-of-5 of single day games it should be a best-of-3 of two-day games. What does everyone think?

The 5 hour games are very intense, often lasting late into the evening. I don't think it is such a bad thing to have this format in the title match. The real negative is that the Honinbo league will be replaced by a knock out with 3 hour time limit, if I understand the translation. Personally I find knock out tournaments to be the worst, it is less games for the fans and really it is less games for the players too. I'm much more interested in the number of games played by professionals than what they earn

Btw what is with all these letters that you say you have sent to the Nihon Kiin, did I miss out on an in joke

[John Fairbairn]

I find it hard to understand this mentality [AI killing off interest]. The invention of the motorbike did not kill off athletics. People still get surprisingly excited by the fact that one person can run faster than another person, even if a machine can outdo all of the people. Closer to home, AI didn't kill off chess. If anything, AI analysis has enriched the game. (Not that chess is exactly looking healthy these days. But for other reasons.)

The analogy of motorbikes and athletics is inapposite for various reasons (a motorbike is not actually a runner). More relevant, I think, was the introduction of drugs that made some runners run faster, or further. I used to watch athletics a lot, with great enjoyment, on tv when I was young but two things turned me off. The first was the introduction of pace runners to create world records artificially. The other was the use of drugs (or, as it was mainly encapsulated in those days, the presence of East Germans in the event). It killed off my interest totally, to the extent that I don't even watch the Olympics today.

That is a subjective response. Other people do watch the Olympics and other people keep running. But that doesn't obviate the fact that many of us have switched off from athletics, and so the total audience is smaller than it could be. That maybe doesn't matter much with events as big as the Olympics, but I happen to feel that with much smaller events such pro go tournaments, even a small proportion of people (or maybe even the "silent majority") being put off can make a big difference, not just in terms of actual numbers playing but in the diminishing respect in which the game is held in the wider world (which impinges on sponsorship).

I believe this has already happened in chess. AI did not kill off chess, and I don't expect it to kill off go. What I do claim, though, is that it is has already killed off interest in both games for many people. In the case of chess, I've heard this from top grandmasters even before Stockfish and AlphaZero came along. This subdued interest leads to sponsorship difficulties and the other issues you hint at.

I personally rarely play go but I do chronicle its history. Any major change such as AI is actually grist to my mill. Therefore, unlike my quondam spectator's interest in athletics, my interest in go is less likely to fade away. But taking the historian's perspective, I can see a distinct possibility that go will now suffer in a way similar to the ending of the Shogunate, which led to a loss of sponsorship and a surge of interest in western bling. It took over 40 years for traditional Japanese arts to recover then. On the other hand, I'd hope that the faster pace of change nowadays may offer some hope for a speedier recovery.

[Kirby]

There is something to be said for the connection to the players that can be achieved due to restrictions on who may participate in a tournament. For example, if the AGA has a go tournament among players in North America, the level of play maybe laughably weak compared to a pro tournament in Asia. Nonetheless, among North American players, such a tournament can garner a lot of interest. One reason for that may be that players in North America can relate to the competitors: they are from the same geographic location; they may have a similar background; someday, it may theoretically be possible to be one of the competitors. Because of these factors, some players in North America may even have *more* interest in AGA tournaments than the Asian counterparts.

The case for human-played go is similar. Yes, the level of play is laughably weak compared to our silicon friends. But we can relate to the players in a way that can't be achieved with AI. Our human role models are real people with their own quirks. They get fatigued and sometimes play emotionally.

This human connection is real, and transcends the moves themselves. For sure, the go playing landscape has changed significantly, and some have lost interest in the game completely. But there remains something magical about the human element that can be seen beyond the moves themselves.

I am reminded of Lee Sedol's move 78 from Game 4 of AlphaGo. Strictly speaking, the move didn't work - it could be refuted, and Lee would continue to have a losing position. But as someone connected to the player on Team Human, there remains something magical about what happened in that game. Maybe Team Human didn't play optimally. But there was something beyond the moves themselves with us on that day. And on that day, we won.