Bill Spight wrote:Sorry for any misunderstanding. By "the book" I meant the original. I do not have the e-book.
I am the one who translated
myou as exquisite.
You will note that that page says for each problem that there is a variation on the next page. Those are the variations that I included in the SGF files.
Edit: Besides, now that I check, they are not failure diagrams.
No problem Bill, thanks for clearing that up. Although I am a bit confused why you posted it then
But, whatever
Only some of the problems have variations. (I would actually classify them as sub-problems.) But John said that he added failure diagrams, so it's all the same.
John Fairbairn wrote:Am I the only one to find this thread extraordinarily snide? Lots of innuendo, wrong assumptions, errors...
Yes, John you might be. I'm sorry you interpreted the posts so negatively.
Actually, I was expecting this sort of post soon enough. You become very emotional and aggressively riposte whenever anything critical is said about your books. You then start attributing the most negative emotions and intent to any such post you're replying too. This tends to 'scare' a lot of people off from making any critical questions or comments about your work. But truthfully, I don't care.
Unlike you, I'm not going to nitpick your post. I hope you can guess why.
The fact remains: you chose to publish this book in the manner that you wanted -- and that's great! I'm very happy for you. But also, because of that there will be inherent advantages and disadvantages. Again, there's nothing wrong with that. There's simply a better version of this book waiting to be published. I stand by the concluding sentence I wrote in my previous post; and I think that the few people who are interesed in serious study of these problems -- because it is a high-level collection -- will enjoy the more thorough and numerous variations and re-organized take in some of the Asian editions.
P.S. It's also silly to expect anyone to buy a book just to browse the introduction/references.
Bill Spight wrote:John Fairbairn wrote:Sixth, logan ignores the standard tsumego convention that game-deciding kos (and approach kos) are usually classed as won by the player who gets to capture the ko. (Just as ladders are always assumed to work.) I discuss this also in GTAM.
Seventh, there is a major error in the blue marks in the Show portion above. The portion marked B/W to play actually says "White to play and live". The point is that Black would not risk losing everything for a ko he can't win, but would let White live and would take life himself in the corner. Shusai's wording implies that.
Right. While it is conceivable that, in a real game, Black would have enough sufficiently large ko threats to opt for the approach ko, the tsumego convention is that the board is otherwise empty. This follows the general principle, not just in tsumego, that everything that is relevant is shown.
Edit: I worked on the position a bit, and, as far as I can tell, even if Black can win the approach ko, he will normally do better to opt for live-live.
This is a huge can of worms and another issue. I won't get into this common argument. But with regards to Shusai's book there are a few things to mull over:
1. Shusai pulls no punches when giving Black's maximum resistance in other problems. He uses the final solutions as the basis for titling the problem as "Black to play," "White to play for ko," "Black to play for ko to live," etc. But in this problem he ignores this for the so-called, "game-deciding ko" convention.
2. Most kos in the book are game-deciding. There's no choice but to ignore any ko threat and take them. Shusai doesn't avoid the strongest resistance in these problems.
3. Shusai doesn't retitle or give the mainline variation as how Black or White should play in a real game.
4. One player is clearly winning before most of these problems even begin.
5. Problem 103 is a particularly interesting case of a game-deciding ko where Black captures the ko first and White cannot win the ko, yet it's titled, "Black to play for ko."
Bill Spight wrote:This follows the general principle, not just in tsumego, that everything that is relevant is shown.
I used to think this. But after looking through so many endgame books, I now don't believe this any longer. (If you don't put who's ahead on ko threats in an endgame problem, then there's going to be a lot of problems.)
, but if he had continued with the Black atari at O-19, we would have a stronger case that he had ignored the Black atari at R-19.