Research in Go - 2011

Marcus · **#41**

Thanks for the detailed response, Robert.

RobertJasiek wrote:

Quote:

I've never been able to study effectively [...] Yet, I have still learned (and still learn) quickly, gaining in knowledge through using skills and refining my techniques endlessly.

Isn't this a contradiction?

Quote:

Perhaps a teacher would be best for me

Do you think you improve fast enough?:)

As for the contradiction, perhaps you're right. My point was that I feel like I do things backwards; I learn from my games (or from my exams) rather than from things like books or tsumego. I suppose that's a type of studying, too.

Do I learn fast enough? I like to think I do ... at least, for the amount of time and effort I have available to play the game. It's a little discouraging sometimes to see some of my former equals (Loons, for instance) get stronger while I continue my slow climb ... but I never feel like I'm stuck anymore (not since 7k or so), so that's got to be a good sign, right?

ez4u · **#42**

John Fairbairn wrote:

Quote:

There is a scanned PDF on the web. If plug the name into Google, you will see one of the links has PDF in the title. I can't see the black move numbers when I view the file but it does allow you to see what the book content looks like.

Is this aiding piracy?

Your Milage May Vary! Personally I did (and do) not think that saying to a mainly non-Chinese-reading audience that a copy of a book in Chinese with unreadable diagrams exists is going to suddenly halt sales of the book.

If anything, I think the opposite. I was excited to find the copy because I wanted to know whether the material was interesting enough to warrant finding the book without being able to read Chinese (hence potentially helping sales!). As noted, you can get a pretty good idea of what it looks like. My conclusion is that it is not, BTW. The text may be better than usual but sadly I can't read it. Overall the coverage is typical for such compendiums. As noted the same thing exists in Japanese, just normally divided into five or six volumes sold together.

Back to the piracy question though, it is interesting that Google's system ranks the site 4th out of 7000+ linked to the book title, ahead of amazon.cn for example. Since the diagrams are unreadable, maybe the text really is that good! :sad:

tchan001 · **#43**

So what you are saying is that it is ok for non-chinese people to pirate chinese language go books because they can't read the language anyways. With the same logic perhaps it would seem ok for chinese people to pirate non-chinese go books since they can't read it much anyways and also because it has the potential to promote the sales of such books.

daal · **#44**

John Fairbairn wrote:

What dawned on me was that the Oriental countries all have this "holistic" kind of book, but also their magazines are equally holistic, and you could even say that their playing environment is equally holistic
...

But (so long as minds are kept open and those tempted to try to apply killer logic can rein themselves in) L19 itself does at least provide the glimmerings of a holistic way of talking about go.

It seems that this subject deserves it's own thread, but since we're talking about it here, I'd like to throw my two cents in.

So far, it seems only redponey has attempted to clarify the concept of holism as related to go. He writes:

redponey wrote:

In order to play a good game, there must be a synergy in the skills we learn, and this synergy is a skill as well, which we might call "holism". But it is one which we do not generally talk about studying, we acquire it through having a built-in aptitude, by reading between the lines in existing books where possible, by oral tradition (if we take lessons), by sink-or-swim, or not at all.

I feel like this is what John is saying about holism in English go literature.

I don't know if this is what John is implying or not, but it does point in an interesting direction. The question for me is "How do we decide on a move?" For each board situation, there are a wealth of factors that come into play, and I suspect that John's enlightenment comes from the realization that the design of specialized go books promotes the focusing on one particular aspect at a time such as joseki or the life of a group, whereas the game demands a broader and more multi-faceted approach.

How to develop the ability to be aware of the range of forces pressing on a position and to grok the best response is something of a holy grail that we are all searching for. Is this really something that can be offered in book form?

One of the first go books I read, Go! More Than a Game by Peter Shotwell offers something of a holistic approach, in that he presents principles and then shows these principles in action during games. He also supplements the technical aspects with essays on go history and culture, which I think is not irrelevant to a holistic approach. I'd love to read a more advanced book structured in a similar manner, but a book I fear can only play a tiny role in teaching us to better prioritize the wealth of sage advice.

In my opinion, one of the best tools we have at our disposal here on L19 is the Malkovitch game. Here we can see what players do and do not consider as relevant. While the format may bore some to tears, it does offer a glimpse into the decision process, and the narrowness or broadness of a players viewpoint becomes apparent.

RobertJasiek · **#45**

daal wrote:

How to develop the ability to be aware of the range of forces pressing on a position and to grok the best response is something of a holy grail that we are all searching for. Is this really something that can be offered in book form?

Sure. Not only something but a lot. See Joseki Vol. 2 Strategy. Although it emphases joseki over middle game, it provides advice for locally and globally applicable concepts, analysis methods and decision making. How? Learn all that, then you can apply it.

gogameguru · **#46**

John Fairbairn wrote:

As it covers the basics so well, I even think it's a shame that so much money was spent, with the best of intentions, by Oriental organisations on things like freebies to the WAGC for a handful of people. If they had spent some of that money on having this book translated (not by me, I hasten to add!), far more westerners would have seen the benefit of the money and we would have a much better grounding.

Quote:

This is neither here nor there, but I sometimes wish some of this money were spent on putting copies of the Elementary Go Series and similar books in public libraries. When you think about it, there are already a lot of really excellent books in English. As great as it would be to have more books translated (especially the very good Chinese encyclopedias) I wonder if we would do more good by making these existing books more widely and easily available. Having used copies of Attack and Defense on Amazon for $93 each doesn't count.

I agree, and improving the distribution of Go books is one of the goals of Go Game Guru. Unfortunately, I've found the major publishers fairly reluctant to sell books wholesale. I'm variously told that business is either too good or too bad to want to sell books to third parties. I can believe one or the other, but not both.

Here's a simple observation, from a simple mind perhaps... When you don't sell books, you don't end up selling any books.

RobertJasiek · **#47**

gogameguru wrote:

I've found the major publishers fairly reluctant to sell books wholesale.

Try the minor publishers! E.g., ask me!

John Fairbairn · **#48**

Quote:

I agree, and improving the distribution of Go books is one of the goals of Go Game Guru. Unfortunately, I've found the major publishers fairly reluctant to sell books wholesale. I'm variously told that business is either too good or too bad to want to sell books to third parties. I can believe one or the other, but not both.

Here's a simple observation, from a simple mind perhaps... When you don't sell books, you don't end up selling any books.

I know this is extremely disingenuous because David wrote to GoGoD at great length and explained rather more than he does here. For example, he reported that at least one company wanted to impose a possibly perfectly reasonable condition that he he did not compete with them in their own area. There were other factors not mentioned here, but we must not stray into commercial confidences.

gogameguru · **#49**

RobertJasiek wrote:

gogameguru wrote:

I've found the major publishers fairly reluctant to sell books wholesale.

Try the minor publishers! E.g., ask me!

Thanks Robert. I haven't had an opportunity to read your books yet, but I've heard good things about them. I'd like to read them myself first and if they're as good as they're reputed to be, we'd be happy to sell them. If you contact me by private message or email us using the address on this page: http://gogameguru.com/contact/ we can discuss the details.

gogameguru · **#50**

John Fairbairn wrote:

Quote:

I agree, and improving the distribution of Go books is one of the goals of Go Game Guru. Unfortunately, I've found the major publishers fairly reluctant to sell books wholesale. I'm variously told that business is either too good or too bad to want to sell books to third parties. I can believe one or the other, but not both.

Here's a simple observation, from a simple mind perhaps... When you don't sell books, you don't end up selling any books.

I know this is extremely disingenuous because David wrote to GoGoD at great length and explained rather more than he does here. For example, he reported that at least one company wanted to impose a possibly perfectly reasonable condition that he he did not compete with them in their own area. There were other factors not mentioned here, but we must not stray into commercial confidences.

John, what precisely about my comment is 'extremely disingenuous'? My email, which you didn't reply to, but apparently read, was mostly technical details about how we could help you distribute GoGoD. Since you aren't interested in that, there's nothing left to discuss on that matter.

In the rest of the email I was asking for your help and advice regarding Slate and Shell. I had no intention of discussing Slate and Shell in particular here, but you're really not leaving me with a lot of choices, are you?

There's more to it than you know, and I really think you should talk to William Cobb about it. Also, you've completely misunderstood what I wrote in the email. Slate and Shell are very protective of the US market. Fine, we know that. But they also refused to sell us books which would be sold in the Australian and European markets. I know from the trial we ran earlier in the year that books sold from Australia will be purchased by people in the US, as well as other countries.

Slate and Shell are naive if they think their existing wholesale customers don't sell books back into the US. So I apparently just made the mistake of being too honest with William and telling him upfront that that would happen to a certain extent (and certainly does already). I was willing to find a solution to the issue of the US market, which is apparently a huge concerns of theirs. However, I do personally think they focus on this one thing too much, to the detriment of their business. We may disagree on that point, that's fine too.

I think the books you've written over the last few years, which we all know are published by Slate and Shell, are very good. They also publish other good books like the Shuko tesuji dictionaries, which I already mentioned earlier in this discussion. Because of that, I'd be happy to help Slate and Shell sell them in Australia and other countries, if they wanted to. That's really all there is to it fundamentally.

For what we're trying to achieve with Go Game Guru, we do need to earn a reasonable amount of money to promote the game in a financially sustainable way. Go books themselves are never going to be a big source of that income, we know that. That's not why we want to sell them. Improving their distribution is useful because it is yet another way to help promote Go using the existing resources.

If you're going to insist on taking things I've said out of context and repeating them here, just publish the whole text of my email discussion with T Mark and let people judge for themselves. The offer I made to you and T Mark was entirely in good faith, and I believe it was reasonable and very generous. There's nothing I said that I'm ashamed of anyway.

Otherwise, talk to your publisher and stop complaining about not selling enough Go books. I've watched you make frequent comments regarding the Go book market and refrained from saying anything for almost a year now. Next time, I'll remind you of this conversation...

tapir · **#51**

Quote:

Wikipedia has succeeded in popularizing human knowledge and keeping it fresh (in my opinion) but one cannot deny that Sensei's Library, "the" wikipedia for Go, has stalled.

Whatever keeping it fresh means, in many areas Wikipedia is a battleground for PR agencies, spin doctors and single interest people. It does a great job in listing all individual WW2 submarines, porn starns and television shows but usually fails in giving a balanced appreciation of anything controversial at all with the people able to write such content constantly retreating from Wikipedia and the format enforcers, recategorizers, interpunctionists, vandalism fighters ruling supreme.

See also: http://senseis.xmp.net/?SLIsNotWikipedia

ez4u · **#52**

tchan001 wrote:

So what you are saying is that it is ok for non-chinese people to pirate chinese language go books because they can't read the language anyways. With the same logic perhaps it would seem ok for chinese people to pirate non-chinese go books since they can't read it much anyways and also because it has the potential to promote the sales of such books.

Well no, that is what you are saying. What I wrote is there for anyone to see. And anyone can use Google to look for whatever they like as well. When you publish your interpretation, that is you speaking. I realize that you are one of the Chinese speakers here, so you may feel differently about it than I do. That is fine. Feel free to express your opinion. However, you are wasting your time acting as my spokesperson.

tchan001 · **#53**

My opinion is that you chose to tell people in this forum that you deliberately downloaded a pdf of a copyrighted book mentioned on this thread. That is an act of piracy which you have documented yourself. You justified it as being ok by saying:

ez4u wrote:

I was excited to find the copy because I wanted to know whether the material was interesting enough to warrant finding the book without being able to read Chinese (hence potentially helping sales!).

The logic of your statement is that it is ok to download a pirate pdf to see if it is interesting. I am just pointing out a logical extension of your position if someone presented the same type of argument in a different setting.

I don't think it is ok for you to tell people in a public forum to download a pdf just because it is available and just because you are unable to read the language. In my opinion, what you have accomplished is promotion of piracy of copyrighted material on a public forum.

redponey · **#54**

And now back to one of the more go related topics in this thread ....

It seems to me that anyone who sees the value in studying professional games (and it appears than many people do see very high value in this) already understand on some level (perhaps subconsciously) that "holism" in an incredibly important idea in studying go.

When you study a professional game, you are studying many aspects of the game together and in context. You see the corner enclosures, extensions, joseki, and the like in relation to the overall fuseki. You see the tesuji, kos, invasions, capture races, etc. surrounded by the rest of the board. You see the end game moves after seeing how those positions developed in the first place.

Granted, this does not go as far as to include other aspects of study about go such as history of the game, history of the players, social context, and other factors that are not captured in the game records (or commentaries).

Still, if you believe holism to be worth studying, studying professional games (especially well commented ones) is one way of accomplishing holistic study, especially if it is not well address in the English go literature.

I guess it's time for me to order a copy of GoGoD!

jts · **#55**

tchan001 wrote:

I don't think it is ok for you to tell people in a public forum to download a pdf just because it is available and just because you are unable to read the language. In my opinion, what you have accomplished is promotion of piracy of copyrighted material on a public forum.

Be careful, tchan. This man is a dangerous pirate. If you make him angry, you may end up walking the plank!

ez4u · **#56**

tchan001 wrote:

My opinion is that you chose to tell people in this forum that you deliberately downloaded a pdf of a copyrighted book mentioned on this thread. That is an act of piracy which you have documented yourself. You justified it as being ok by saying:

ez4u wrote:

I was excited to find the copy because I wanted to know whether the material was interesting enough to warrant finding the book without being able to read Chinese (hence potentially helping sales!).

The logic of your statement is that it is ok to download a pirate pdf to see if it is interesting. I am just pointing out a logical extension of your position if someone presented the same type of argument in a different setting.

I don't think it is ok for you to tell people in a public forum to download a pdf just because it is available and just because you are unable to read the language. In my opinion, what you have accomplished is promotion of piracy of copyrighted material on a public forum.

As long as we are clear on who you are speaking for, I am fine. As mentioned, YMMV. But just to make sure I understand your position, I'd like to check. You think it is better that I not try to determine whether the book is worth buying, right? I should just give up and walk away from a potentially interesting and helpful book, right? I checked Amazon first, but it did not have the helpful "look inside" feature (it did not even have the cover photo). I think I get what you consider the wrong course of action (but don't let me put words in your mouth), but what do you consider the right course of action?

tchan001 · **#57**

The right course of action is to ask to see if someone has a copy and if they would give a review of what the content is. Based on their opinion, you can choose whether to buy it or not (whether it is available is a different concern). If you are able to find it in a bookstore and the bookstore allows you to preview it, that's great as you are able to get even more information about whether you want to buy it or not. If the publisher chooses to provide a preview sample pdf for download, you are of course welcome to do so. If you have friends who are willing to lend you their copy, please enjoy their kindness.

My point is that if you wouldn't tell people to download a pirate version of an English language go book to preview for a possible purchase, why should it be different just because it is in a different language. Perhaps you would though but that's your call, not mine. YMMV.

gogameguru · **#58**

redponey wrote:

And now back to one of the more go related topics in this thread ....

It seems to me that anyone who sees the value in studying professional games (and it appears than many people do see very high value in this) already understand on some level (perhaps subconsciously) that "holism" in an incredibly important idea in studying go.

When you study a professional game, you are studying many aspects of the game together and in context. You see the corner enclosures, extensions, joseki, and the like in relation to the overall fuseki. You see the tesuji, kos, invasions, capture races, etc. surrounded by the rest of the board. You see the end game moves after seeing how those positions developed in the first place.

Granted, this does not go as far as to include other aspects of study about go such as history of the game, history of the players, social context, and other factors that are not captured in the game records (or commentaries).

Still, if you believe holism to be worth studying, studying professional games (especially well commented ones) is one way of accomplishing holistic study, especially if it is not well address in the English go literature.

I guess it's time for me to order a copy of GoGoD!

I agree. Replaying pro games and really trying to understand what's going on is one of the most rewarding and also enjoyable ways of studying Go. Playing Go is also an excellent form of study, if you want to look at things that way

. So is reviewing them.

Most of the other stuff, like solving Go problems, is just an effective means to an end. In my opinion, one of the main advantages of solving a lot of problems is that it helps you start to understand more of what's going on in pro games and makes replaying them more fun.

There's a school of thought in music that holds that repetitive technical practise doesn't crush creativity, but frees it. In my experience that's true in Go as well as music and most other things worth doing.

Research in Go - 2011

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