Is Cho ChiHoon(ChKun) too old for younger generation?
He lost to insei(Kim SungJin) in Agon cup. Very surprised to see it happen..(Feel very sad.)

Korean insei are very strong, a lot of professionnal lost against korean insei.

For example, Moon Dowon is 2P, but when she was insei, she beat a lot of pro

IMO,

level of players have gotten stroner over the years.
i personally think Cho in his prime can not win against current top players like Lee sehdol.
only reason Cho was successful is that his competitions were not strong.

then again..it's only my opinion.

_________________
"The more we think we know about
The greater the unknown"
Words by neil peart, music by geddy lee and alex lifeson

On the other hand, Huang Longshi is refered to be as strong as 13p by Go Seigen and he is pretty dead since a few hundred years. Well, maybe Go Seigen is now, too, considered weak compared to nowadays players? Or are nowadays top-players themselves as good as 13p?
If I remember correctly Dosaku was refered to be at least 13p aswell.
Then again, is Shusaku only (mostly) praised as one of the strongest players in history because of Hikaru no Go or is there something more solid, which would back that up?

But those are japanese players and their are naturally considered weak in international competition, ... so I heard. Difficult ^^

_________________
My "guide" to become stronger in Go

I don't think that modern players are stronger.
It is just that they are playing different game. The talent is absolute and cannot be compared in any way. Japanese go plays longer game and other country are playing shorter game. Shorter game looks very exciting and appeal to audience. But playing shorter game is detrimental to game itself. Just my 2 cents.

Wouldn't a modern pro crush Huang Longshi in the opening?

During the prime Cho won title in 2 day game and also shorter game which proves if you are good at one then you are good at other.

i can not understand why people think japanese will do well if the game is 2day game.
it is a fact that they are weaker than Korean and Chinese players.
more time will not help them win the game.

_________________
"The more we think we know about
The greater the unknown"
Words by neil peart, music by geddy lee and alex lifeson

from what i know, Shusaku had impressive winning ratio and other stats but there were stronger players in history. to already mentioned Dosaku and Huang Longshi i would add Honinbo Shuei, who is the last classical player whose games are still studied by modern players (i hope i am not wrong on this)

the truth is that the level of theory and knowledge rises through the time so today players are stronger than past ones. still, it doesn't say anything about who of them would be stronger if they lived in the same time (so they could compete on equal terms)


i agree strength is pretty much independent on time limits. but i wonder which players produce better game records, i guess long Japanese limits would beat stronger Chinese/Korean players. (this is mainly philosophical question. Chinese/Korean could surely produce better games than they do, but they don't)

_________________
Spilling gasoline feels good.

I might be wrong, but probably not.

Regardless of who would be stronger in a slower game, it's unfortunate that so many games are played so quickly these days.

It's difficult to argue that it doesn't reduce the quality of the game and it would be nice to see top players take their time and create real masterpieces more often.

It's the media, of course, who keep pushing for faster and faster games, just like they do in other sports. A few years ago, Korean veteran Seo Bongsu criticized this trend, saying that it turned professional players into clowns who had to perform while the crowd laughed at them. I know other professional players feel the same way.

On the topic of Cho, he is also getting quite old and it's natural for certain functions of the brain to degrade and others to improve as people age.

_________________
David

Go Game Guru: Learn Go | How to Get Better at Go | Go Game Shop | Go Boards | Baduk TV

I'm in this camp. I suspect modern players are stronger because there's a bigger pool, they are possibly healthier, and they've had, one assumes, the benefit of improvements in teaching methods.

But if you ask whether modern games are better, the answer may be no. I have spent the last year or so producing books on games of the past that were played over long periods - six months in one case. What I noticed in the very many pro commentaries I looked at is that very few mistakes were found. There was quite a bit of "nowadays we'd do this" in the opening, but that shouldn't obscure the fact that generally the players in these old games were then innovating as well as producing almost mistake-free games. These were famous games, but you often encounter comments about more ordinary games to the effect that they were almost perfect, too. There is thus a case to be made for studying these games above all others.

Going back to players rather than games, with the exception of Takemiya, I can't think of any modern player who can be said to have re-defined go theory in some significant way, whereas names like O-Senchi, Shuho, Shuei, Shusai and Go Seigen leap out.

Forgive my ignorance, but could you tell me what innovations Shuho, Shuei and Shusai came up with? I know Shusai wrote a famous book of life and death problems and Shuei's games were said to be like flowing water, but nothing more about them. O-Senchi's name rings a bell, and I'm sure I've heard/read what he invented, but it's not coming to my mind at the moment either.

Would you draw the conclusion that innovation has slowed (since 1940? 1950? or some other date), or that it's now the product of a great many minds making smaller contributions?

_________________
Occupy Babel!

There will always be innovations in the game, but being known as a player who redefines go theory is on a totally different scale.

_________________
http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

I wrote about the three Shus in a book which has just arrived in England yesterday, 29 April 2011 (The Old versus New Fuseki) so I'm sure you'll forgive me not wanting to repeat it here, but in a nutshell they redefined fuseki, and Shuei added to that mastery of miai play. O-Senchi was the Takemiya of his day, but rather more formidable in some ways as being the true pioneer of the cenre-oriented style and at a time when there was no komi. The same book will also show you that Go's contribution to New Fuseki is generally overrated (there was more evolution than generally supposed), but he innovated in several other areas, too.

As to Shusai being famous for a life & death book - phooey. Several of the problems there were straight copies of ancient ones. What was famous about that book was the presentation. It marked the first real attempt to present a reader-friendly problem book to the general public and, for that, was as significant in its day as e-books today. In fact I have produced an e-book version of it for that very reason (when it will appear is out of my hands, but very soon I expect - for SmartGo Kifu). Jiji Shinpo deserve the credit more than Shusai.

I think it stands to reason that the quality of a game depends on you definition of quality. To some, this could mean optimal play. To others, there is something fascinating - skillful - maybe finesseful (?) about having the skill to play well under time pressure.

Consider the field of AI. Many machine learning algorithms are not deterministic. The use probability to infer likely best decisions given a set of incomplete information. Some such algorithms can do amazing things, from detecting stuff in images, to predicting stock trends, to even playing go under time constraints. If I were to measure the quality and intelligence of such algorithms compared to a brute-force algorithm that they teach in a high school math class, the non-deterministic algorithm is often much more complex, elegant, and impressive to me.

In the same way, I am not impressed if someone can brute force the solution to 5x5 tic-tac-toe in 5 days. I am impressed if someone can show the aptitude to make probabalistic decisions in the face of uncertainty under tight time constraints playing the same game.

I won't claim that crappy fast play is impressive. But near-optimal play under fast time constraints is. It shows intuition, skill, and quick thonking more than slow games often do.

If a computer can brute force go by calculating for 1000 years, that's impressive. But if there's a 5d algorithm that can decide moves in under 5 seconds - well, that's more pressive to me. It shows true skill and aptitude in the underlying algorithm - something more than basic, run-of-the-mill brute force.

_________________
be immersed

Wow, there's an awful lot to challenge there. The very first statement - you pays your money and you takes your choice - may seem unobjectionable, but definitions of quality are also subject to quality tests. You get what you pay for. While I can believe that a tag artist who climbs onto a bridge parapet and daubs his graffiti at high speed before the police helicopter comes over might impress some people more than an artist who first builds a secure scaffold and then paints the Sistine chapel at leisure. But I don't think they are being impressed by the art.

I'm no mathematician, but I still have a hunch that the work of people like Samuels who found the alphabeta algorithm and all its subsequent variations that made brute-force searches a practical reality in AI is at least as impressive, era for era, as the probabilistic work of other academics who seem mostly to be building on that work.

But the main objection is surely to the implication that go experts who play slowly are using brute-force. As far as I can tell they are using exactly the same probabilistic thought processes as if they play fast, with the crucial difference that they have time to do a quality check. I can't see any significant downside to slow play in go quality terms. Fast play just suits the short attention spans of modern tv audiences better. Not much of a recommendation.

I don't think this is true, or at least it's an exaggeration:

http://senseis.xmp.net/?ProfessionalTournamentTimeLimits

A true statement is: "The big 3 Japanese titles have longer games than other tournaments."

But the gaps, especially in the main tournament, are not that large. The Meijin, Honinbo, and Kisei use 5 hours per player in the main league. The main Korean titles use 4 hours in the main tournament, like the Gosei. Most international cups and Chinese domestic tournaments use 3 hours, like the Judan, Oza, and Tengen.

When Cho U battles Iyama Yuta over the Tengen today (maybe they've already played?), he'll get 3 hours, the same amount of time he was given when he lost to Kim Jiseok in last year's Fujitsu cup at the round of 8.

I guess I will try to summarize my perspective concisely:
1.) I believe that fast play is an exhibition of fast thinking. I think that fast thinking is an admirable quality, which deserves respect.

2.) It's a little snarky to say so, but I also can't help but wonder if fans of slow playing pros that lose against faster playing opponents use time limits as an excuse for the loss.

_________________
be immersed

Slow players who are good enough to have fans, i.e. titlewinners, are invariably winners of quickplay titles, too. So these fast-thinking players deserve your respect, too. There has been a lot of research that shows that experts in many fields nearly always make the same decision whether they have lots of time or little time to think about it. The fast thinking occurs whether you play slowly or fast, and a pro knows almost at once which move he is likely to play. This is quite different from we amateurs do. A little extra time can make a big difference to the move we choose. For a pro the extra time is, as I've said, not about finding moves but mainly about quality control. Fast pro games therefore have no extra skill requirement specially worthy of respect. They just skip the quality control.

I suspect what you really would like to say is that Korean players are better than Japanese at present. I'd have no problems with that, at fast or slow speeds. But, on average, slow Japanese games surely still have more quality than Mickey Mouse Korean ones.

It seems that with more modern games, sometimes I read the commentaries in Weiqi Tiandi and see pros reflecting on their own games and tell us about moves they regret having made at certain junctures in their games. When compared with JF's comment about how the classical Japanese games would be mainly mistake free, it seems that pros of the past had higher quality games in terms of self satisfaction in their plays.

_________________
http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.