Life & Death Encyclopedia Problems
Posted: Thu Aug 05, 2010 9:36 am
I've recently started working through the problems from the Elementary section of Cho's Encyclopedia of Life & Death found on tsumego.tasuki.org and thought I'd post some of the ones I found interesting here. I'm not so far yet: I'm just past 100 and there are 900 problems in the elementary section alone!
Despite the Study Journal section, this isn't really to hold myself accountable and I don't promise to keep doing them, but it seemed nice to post some of the more interesting ones as I go along (if I keep going along). Feel free to join in and offer solutions. I do "have the answers" for the ones I post (unless I get stuck on one and then I'll mention that), but only in that I've worked them out myself, seeing as there are no solutions given.
As for why I chose these problems: they're very easily portable (being electronic) and the idea of a progressive encyclopedia that introduces all necessary ideas for later tsumego in earlier ones appeals. I don't know to what extent that goes on really, but from the problems I've solved (and glancing further) it seems it does, for example:
Problem 67 comes first, but problem 68 is in some sense a prerequisite or hint. It's a bit funny they come in that order, but perhaps the idea is that if you get stuck on 67, you decide to skip it for a little while and keep going and then see 68. (It seems also that the encyclopedia itself was not just a list of problems, so perhaps the translation into a list of problems has created these peculiarities.)
Problem 67:
Problem 68:
This next one took me much longer than the surrounding ones for some reason (as always, it looks very simple in retrospect):
Problem 45:
And this next one I put down and came back later to, only to find that in the interim I'd seen and solved a very similar problem on kgs!
Problem 97
A mild comment/hint:
A few others I marked down as more interesting/challenging than their surroundings: 17, 38, 78, 102.
Despite the Study Journal section, this isn't really to hold myself accountable and I don't promise to keep doing them, but it seemed nice to post some of the more interesting ones as I go along (if I keep going along). Feel free to join in and offer solutions. I do "have the answers" for the ones I post (unless I get stuck on one and then I'll mention that), but only in that I've worked them out myself, seeing as there are no solutions given.
As for why I chose these problems: they're very easily portable (being electronic) and the idea of a progressive encyclopedia that introduces all necessary ideas for later tsumego in earlier ones appeals. I don't know to what extent that goes on really, but from the problems I've solved (and glancing further) it seems it does, for example:
Problem 67 comes first, but problem 68 is in some sense a prerequisite or hint. It's a bit funny they come in that order, but perhaps the idea is that if you get stuck on 67, you decide to skip it for a little while and keep going and then see 68. (It seems also that the encyclopedia itself was not just a list of problems, so perhaps the translation into a list of problems has created these peculiarities.)
Problem 67:
Problem 68:
This next one took me much longer than the surrounding ones for some reason (as always, it looks very simple in retrospect):
Problem 45:
And this next one I put down and came back later to, only to find that in the interim I'd seen and solved a very similar problem on kgs!
Problem 97
A mild comment/hint:
A few others I marked down as more interesting/challenging than their surroundings: 17, 38, 78, 102.
at 
)
at 
leads to problem 151, thus Black lives.