Life In 19x19

Thank you!

aeb: Michael Redmond recently did a video and sgf review of a Dosaku game, and his sgf differs from yours at http://homepages.cwi.nl/~aeb/go/games/g ... ku/052.sgf with info
1670-05-06 Kanbun 10-3-17 Kikugawa Yuseki Honinbo Dosaku 2 W+R 143

His record at http://www.usgo.org/news/wp-content/upl ... edited.sgf has black 66 at d2 as a tesuji instead of the more natural e3 block, to prevent c4 atari being sente which is where black wants to link up. When someone linked your collection (thanks!) before the Redmond sgf was available I did wonder when replaying it why white didn't atari there (maybe black ignores and pushes in the centre?).

Uberdude wrote:aeb: Michael Redmond recently did a video and sgf review of a Dosaku game, and his sgf differs from your Dosaku/052.sgf. His record has black 66 at d2 as a tesuji instead of the more natural e3 block, to prevent c4 atari being sente.

Yes, thanks. I saw that sgf (but not the video). Concerning this game, I have five versions, and (where the Redmond version is 4.sgf and my published version is 5.sgf).
The reason that I picked 5.sgf was purely formal: it is the "middle" one: two versions differ from it in move 66, two other versions in move 68.

Andrew

The traditional version of this game (i.e. the version known the longest) has just 99 moves and 66 is at E3 and 68 at B5. When Go Seigen gave his commentary on it, he raised no query about 66 (but did discuss the alternative of 67 at 69 - he concluded 67 was "inevitable"). But he did say 68 (at B5) was a mistake, though in the sense that it was a bad play rather than a typo (or brusho).

When Sakai Takeshi published his more recent book on Dosaku he gave a version with 143 moves and with 66 at D2 and 68 at B7. This version was also used by the Nihon Ki-in in a complete collected of Dosaku's games but they added a note to say that this record was full of misprints.

For that reason, the GoGoD version retains the Go Seigen moves up to 99 and adds the other moves, with a suitable note, but that was an arbitrary choice, swayed no doubt by Go's eminence! However, Go came in for some criticism for his Dosaku book. I can't remember if it was Sakai who led the chorus

I have seen no discussion of reasons for favouring one version over the other, though I imagine it would always be normal to plump for the longer one.

The game also comes with two different dates. All the versions simply give the result as W+ (not W+R), and some specifically say that the rest of the moves are unknown (this is very common with games of this era, both in Japan and China).

The AGA/Redmond version gives Black as Kikukawa. This is a possible reading but Hayashi Yutaro researched these things by going to family registration records and he gives Kikugawa, which is also the commoner reading anyway.

At least a dozen Dosaku game records have major discrepancies and there are a few that may not even be genuine.

John Fairbairn wrote:The traditional version of this game (i.e. the version known the longest) has just 99 moves and 66 is at E3 and 68 at B5. When Sakai Takeshi published his more recent book on Dosaku he gave a version with 143 moves and with 66 at D2 and 68 at B7.
The GoGoD version retains the Go Seigen moves up to 99 and adds the other moves,
All the versions simply give the result as W+ (not W+R), and some specifically say that the rest of the moves are unknown.

Good! Your 99-move version is my 1.sgf, the GoGoD version is my 2.sgf, and you explain the status of this latter version: it is a GoGoD construct combining the start of 1.sgf with the tail of 4.sgf. In that case I should probably follow Redmond with 4.sgf.
Redmond writes LB[of:A][qi:B]C[White is alive with A or B. Black can only resign at this point.], suggesting that there are no further moves.

John Fairbairn wrote: At least a dozen Dosaku game records have major discrepancies and there are a few that may not even be genuine.

Is there any particular theory about why some games attributed to Dosaku are not geunine? Are those games suspected to have been played around the same era as Dosaku's but by somebody else, or are they more recent?

Is there any particular theory about why some games attributed to Dosaku are not geunine? Are those games suspected to have been played around the same era as Dosaku's but by somebody else, or are they more recent?

There's a small handful of games in Chinese sources that, as far as I know, have never been acknowledged in Japanese sources except for one where the number of moves differs. It may just be that the Japanese collectors haven't been aware of these games. Or they may regard them as spurious.

There's a couple of games in the Japanese corpus where alternatives exist as regards the players. The most interesting is a relatively recent find where we know only that it features two of three named players but whether Dosaku is one of them is uncertain. He is given simply as Sensei, which suggests to me he was viewing ex cathedra, but some people think he was actually playing.

Then of course there is the Dosaku game invented for the 2012 film about Shibukawa Shunkai.

John Fairbairn wrote:

Is there any particular theory about why some games attributed to Dosaku are not genuine?

There's a small handful of games in Chinese sources that, as far as I know, have never been acknowledged in Japanese sources except for one where the number of moves differs.

Just for fun I checked whether I could add "doubtful" to some of my Dosaku games. But it seems most of my sources give the same 153 games. Also GoGoD (Winter 2015) has the same 153 games. I have not seen anybody express doubt about any of these games. Of course there is uncertainty about the details.
Let me compare my collection with the GoGoD collection. A conspicuous date difference is GoGoD "Genroku ?15 II 13" where I have "Genroku 4-2-13" (that is, 1702? vs 1691). In 15 cases the moves differ other than just by rotation/reflection. Usually the difference is by 1 or 2 moves only, and often the GoGoD version has a Game Comment stating that other versions exist. In two cases (046.sgf, 049.sgf) I have 25 and 20 additional moves and in three further cases (013.sgf, 058.sgf, 059.sgf) there are many differences (while the first 150+ moves are identical). Probably the former two were meant by John with "not acknowledged in Japanese sources".

aeb wrote:The first published collection was on 2000-01-01 and had 1111 games, probably the only largish public domain collection. Yesterday the count passed 40000.

Updated the collection at http://homepages.cwi.nl/~aeb/go/games/index.html.
Today the count passed 43000. New are the games from the five recent AlphaGo videos. Completed and corrected the Castle Go collection - maybe this is the most accurate version available today as far as the moves are concerned. The metadata still needs work.

Today I encountered a Go Seigen game that was new to me. It is not in the Winter 2015 GoGoD collection.

aeb wrote:Today the count passed 43000.

Updated the collection at http://homepages.cwi.nl/~aeb/go/games/index.html.
It has a bit over 46000 games. New are the 1880 games from Hoensha, and todays Samsung final. Two old Cho Chikun games that I had not seen before (games with the winner of the 20th Kansai Ki-in 1st Place title, game1, game2, he lost both).

Never seen these two games before. There are a collection of Sanyo special games between the Kansai Kiin 1st Place winners and top Nihon Kiin players. These must be from the same set.

macelee wrote:These must be from the same set.

Yes.

I encountered two new Cho Chikun games from 1973, see https://homepages.cwi.nl/~aeb/go/games/ ... index.html. The collection of his games now contains 2300+ games.

aeb wrote:I encountered two new Cho Chikun games from 1973.

And another one from 1976.
And two more from 1975. And two more from 1974. And two more.
It turns out that it is easy to find unknown Cho Chikun games. I'll stop mentioning them.