Life In 19x19

I visited KGS this afternoon and something jumped out at me and I never noticed it until now. There is no I after H on the alphabet when looking at coordinates. I checked by looking at my other software titles and noticed the same thing...there is no I after H. Can anybody explain this?

An I and l sure look alike, don't they?

I may be confused with L in lower case. This is the reason why I is excluded as a convention.

Perhaps because I and J are pronounced in such a similar way

kex wrote:Perhaps because I and J are pronounced in such a similar way

Are you sure it's not because i and j would have a fight over which is actually the square root of -1?

I've gotten a half dozen bug reports along these lines. From people sure it must be some crazy mistake that there is no "i" column on their board. I try to answer as nicely as I can.

Hmm, "i" vs no "i" debate... and apparently no "i" wins... somebody has been taking liberties.

Remembering a 20 year old discussion; the original recording notation was invented in Germany and either I and J are the same letter in German or they look and or sound too similar in German. The rest of the world just adopted that convention.

mdobbins wrote:Remembering a 20 year old discussion; the original recording notation was invented in Germany and either I and J are the same letter in German or they look and or sound too similar in German. The rest of the world just adopted that convention.

FWIW, in German, just an in English, i and j are written and spoken differently, so I guess the mentioned similarity between “I” (uppercase i) and “l” (lowercase L) must be the reason, just to rule out any misunderstandings w/o having to force ppl to use uppercase or lowercase letters.

Grüße aus Deutschland,

Tom

Actually, I and J look very similar in at least some fraktur typefaces. I could not find tekstur typefaces to check.

kex wrote:Actually, I and J look very similar in at least some fraktur typefaces. I could not find tekstur typefaces to check.

Yes, this is it. Mdobbins had it. Go into a library and look for a German book from the 19th century.

I personally really hate that the westernized coordinates are totally upside down compared to the eastern coordinates. If you're coming from western igo and trying to, say, watch a Japanese igo broadcast, it's hard to tell what point the scorekeeper is announcing.

I find it strange that shogi and go have reversed the column coordinates starting position. When I watch NHK, it just seems strange to see the first game go one way and the next go another.

I don't know why igo's coordinates are the way they are, but shogi's coordinates are set up the way you would read vertical Japanese text: Starting from the top right, going down, and then going left.