Life In 19x19

In Australia the DD/MM/YY format is common too. On Go Game Guru, we use the American convention, putting the date first and spelling the month out as in October 5, 2011. This avoids ambiguity and I've assumed - perhaps incorrectly - that Europeans (and Australians) may be more used to seeing dates formatted in different ways.

The Chinese usually write the date as YYYY/MM/DD (I believe most Asian cultures use this convention?). While there's an inherent logic in biggest to smallest, smallest to biggest seems just as logical. Depending on what you're doing, the most useful bit of information could be any of the three, so there's no clear candidate for what should go first. It's nice when files have nice names that sort properly. Written language and computers perhaps demand different conventions though. I agree that this isn't something that can be resolved with logic alone...

Forgive me for going off topic, but the Samsung Cup is really getting pretty interesting!

Who thinks Na Hyun can make it? I'm cheering for him! (did you know Australians usually support the underdog?) We're running a poll: Who will win the 16th Samsung Cup. Come along and hazard a guess .

Since we're well into pedantry, we should avoid the term "logical", in favor of "efficient" or "natural" (where the latter is used to mean something like "fitting people's expectations").

I'm not just saying that because I think we should use "logic" the way philosophers and mathematicians use it, but also because even in the common-sense understanding of the word "logic", there's a lot of different ways that something might be logical. See Herman's latter post.

P.S. This will really make you groan, John, but I believe that among the cognoscenti, everyone accepts that the most "logical" base should be a multiple of 6 (1,2,3 evenly divide 6, while only 1,2 and 5 evenly divide 10).

Jordus wrote:Samsung cup games will be on L19TV (http://lifein19x19.com/L19TV.php) starting at 5:00pm korean time... about an hour an a half from this post...

Calendar and chat windows, that is very nice. Thanks!

Could you add time information to the calendar on the page? I don't mean specifically for the Samsung Cup but in general.

Are you (or is some other L19 resident) chbee (the stream source)?

Can you add a clock showing the Korean time as in ch-bee's website?

Also, when I watch the stream through ch-bee's website it doesn't get interrupted by the commercials. It does on L19 and ustream sites. How come? (curious )

Edit: I just noticed your other thread for game times, I can just follow that (thanks again) viewtopic.php?f=9&t=4729

hyperpape wrote:P.S. This will really make you groan, John, but I believe that among the cognoscenti, everyone accepts that the most "logical" base should be a multiple of 6 (1,2,3 evenly divide 6, while only 1,2 and 5 evenly divide 10).

No it is not more logical. It serves the purpose of having a base number with many divisors. It's a fair requirement and certainly a mathematical one but not a formally logical one.

What would be inconsistent is to say that something starts on 12/5/11 and ends on 6/12/11 while what you mean is that it takes one day.
What would be illogical is to say that something starts on Monday and ends on Friday and takes one day.

Incidentally, with 10 as a base number you have no shortcut to find out if a number can be divided by 7. With 12 as a base number you have no such shortcut for 5 and 7. What you seem to be missing with 10, namely divisibility by 3, you get back from n-1=9. For number base n, any number with sum of digits divisible by (a divisor of) n-1 is itself divisible by (a divisor of) n-1. In base 12 there is not much to gain from n-1, being a prime number, 11.

I'll interrupt this thread with the not entirely logical assertion that I think Gu Li will win against Na Hyun in the next round.

Na is playing very impressively, but Gu looks to be in top form with a decisive win against Kim Jiseok.

I'm hoping for fireworks in the semifinals.

Dieter, what did you think my scare quotes were for? I even say that I want people to use "logical" the way that philosophers and mathematicians use it.

Well, mm/dd/yy is illogical or logical, I don't know.
I've been using this format for the last 30 years. I used to be systems programmer before retiring. We used mm/dd/yy in programming most of time. Now you can see it is hard to change habit.

Predictions:

Na Hyun 2 > 1 Gu Li
Chen Yaoye 2 > 0 Won Seongjin

Na Hyun 2 > 1 Chen Yaoye

Believe it!

If Na Hyun wins this tournament, 1p -> 9p?????????

trout wrote:If Na Hyun wins this tournament, 1p -> 9p?????????

As far as I know, no. An international win is a promotion of three ranks according to http://senseis.xmp.net/?SenseisGazette

There is no mechanism to be promoted directly to 9p in Korea. Winning a major international title merits a promotion of 3 ranks, and being a finalist only merits a promotion of 1 rank.

trout wrote:Well, mm/dd/yy is illogical or logical, I don't know.
I've been using this format for the last 30 years. I used to be systems programmer before retiring. We used mm/dd/yy in programming most of time. Now you can see it is hard to change habit.

As a programmer, I can only too well imagine how ghastly this must have been. I guess you wrote lots of routines to hide from the horror.

Well I too am retired after a decades in the cypher mines, a few hundred thousand lines of code in my day.

Not so bad dealing with mm/dd/yy. Or were you assuming that the display numerics that the user gets to see on screen of printout are the same as the format (even data type) used in the claculations?

For example -- suppose you are using a number which is the Julian date (that's the YYYYMMDD order). But you had to code a bit of editing for that to display (characters, not numbers) YYYY/MM/DD --- or did you imagine that those "/" appeared by magic. Since you are extracting parts of the number and converting to character and placing in spaced apart fields it really isn't ANY harder to have those fields in a different order.

I'm really not much interested in what is more logical, or whether or not computer can or cannot deal with different date formats. What I am interested in here is communication. When you write 5/12/11, I cannot read it. It is a bit, je pense, like switching to French, of Nederlands, in the middle of a sentence. It breaks the flow. I have to stop and think, which of those numbers is which? And sometimes, the only thing to go by is an informed guess on whether the author is American or European. So please, use something I can read?

I know, I know, a renderer and an editor can be entirely independent of the internal format.

Fine, m/d/y is not "illogical" but it's implausible, unintuitive and mildly distressing to those of us who prefer things to be internally consistent.

moonrabbit wrote:I'll interrupt this thread ...

Thanks moonrabbit!