Instead of counting the difference of numbers of stones, my method of such kind would be to count the difference of numbers of INFLUENCE stones, i.e., the influence stone difference. (In this example, stones and influence stones coincide, but this is often not so!) And my conclusion would be: it is too close to 0 to have a decisive meaning. Therefore, reading is mandatory.

Well, Sonoda's a 9-dan pro and you're not. And he says more about his method than I've revealed, so you need to read the book before you leap to judgement.

1) One does not need to read a book (of a 9p or not) to understand that useless or dead inside stones beyond the outside-influence generating stones ought not to be counted as stones in competition for potential.

2) I have written many principles and applied them to, e.g., pro games so demonstrated that influence stone difference is the relevant concept. Stone difference (in contrast to influence stone difference) has other applications, e.g., when assessing inefficiency of useless or dead stones.

Yes you do. Sonoda even counts captured stones, which made my eyes do a Tom and Jerry take-off. But the sense of it dawned on me later. Read the book.

For what purposes does he count captured (or useless live) stones?

Do you suggest this for assessing outside potential?

Can the book be read meaningfully by diagrams and numbers without otherwise reading any Japanese? ISBN?

I have not yet absorbed this well enough to speak here. It also comes up a lot and I haven't read the whole book yet. But I'm reasonably convinced he's right.



He doesn't mention outside potential, and not even thickness really. He's not measuring what I think you think he's measuring, and he's not measuring rigorously in the way you would - he's just a creating an immediately useful tool. Ultimately he wants us to cultivate a homogenous, informed first way of looking at positions so as to develop good judgement. The fundamentals really



I very much doubt it. It's long and texty, with a quite different structure from most books. There are non-standard proverbs. On the other hand, strict definitions are important (he makes fascinating points about the difference between attacks, chases, attempts to capture, seriai (running battles) and ijime (and to understand all of that, some familiarity with Japanese military history and topography is useful). Numbers are rarely given - he just wants us to know if a count is more than, equal, or less than. That's all buried in the text. Similarly, lots of diagrams have unusual shading on them - that's explained in the text, too (not very well, though).

It's not perfect but the more I've read it the more I've been impressed. At least it's exposed some painful flaws in my own play while offering a remedy. I can also quickly spot apparent flaws in other people's play better now. It's a shame I don't play enough now to absorb all this for practical use. Or to put it another way, I wish I'd had this book 50 years ago.

Whether tools related to stone difference need be rigorous or can be rough depends on purpose of application.

Applications needing rigorous stone differences:
1) assessing josekis (which are related to equality)
2) assessing efficiency of newly played stones (a sequence is fair exactly in the case of equality)

Application possible with rough stone differences:
3) everything related to 'influence in a region'

(2) and (3) can be called "immediately useful", although (2) is rigorous whilst (3) is not. It would be a great mistake to let (2) be rough because one stone played too many during a sequence is like passing once.

Today I posted a game commentary in Majordomo's "Progress in Black and White". He plays as a 3 kyu on KGS and (from my own fallible 1d perspective) does a lot of things right in terms of what I consider to be the fundamentals. His opponent being a bit of a jerk, he said at some point to Majordomo "it's because of people like you that go is so boring". At that point, Majordomo was leading comfortably, by playing only normal moves - one could say dull moves, but I've seen so many games where the player(s) did not respect the flow of the game, that I found his go rather beautiful to watch. So, the opponent's derogatory remark was actually a great compliment. Unfortunately, Majordomo failed to finish off the opponent on 2 occasions - a surrounded group was waiting for the fatal blow - and later on made a few more mistakes due to which the jerky opponent pulled of a fluke victory. Nevertheless, the game is worth reviewing for any amateur player, to see how Majordomo courageously followed fundamental strategic principles of go: connect, cut, surround, escape.

Posted again here for convenience:

You can see a "look inside" preview of Sonoda's book on Amazon.co.jp - go to their homepage, bottom of page, language English. At top of this page select Japanese books and enter ISBN - that's in JF's post "A Slew of Books" - but it's ISBN 978-4-8399-5951-7.

This preview shows you images of the contents (7 pages, 1 page not available), then Part 1 Intro (4 pages of proverbs) and finally Theme 1 diagram ( a four stone game), followed by 6 diagrams. This way you can at least get an idea of the level of Japanese involved.

There are reviews of two of Sonoda's earlier books on Sensei's Libarary.

http://senseis.xmp.net/?GoStrategy
http://senseis.xmp.net/?GoodPointsAndBadPointsToPlay

I tried using a pop-up Japanese-English dictionary add-on for Firefox with Amazon Japan - it's very useful. It makes looking at book web-sites much easier, if your Japanese is limited.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-gb/firefox/addon/rikaichan/

You can't use it with the full page images from the Amazon preview - you need the Japanese text as unicode - you can of course OCR the images and produce an HTML file of the page and then you have a pop-up dictionary and all of a sudden it's got really late! Unfortunately the Amazon images are only at 96dpi, for OCR of Japanese text 300 dpi is needed. I have used Abbyy Finereader for OCR of both English and also Japanese.

My copy of Sonoda's book arrives on Tuesday.

Best Wishes - John