Life In 19x19

jts wrote:Surprised Yamashita is doing better than Shibano. No one is surprised that Ichiriki and Iyama are #1 and #2, but I would have guessed those two play Shibano more often than anyone else besides each other.

My guess is that Shibano was 3rd in the overall ranking.

Yes, an early-early 3-3. Take that, AlphaGo, which takes the credit for innovation just like Doetsu (probably) overshadowing Yusen. Remarkably, katago seems to say this is the best move. More remarkably, when the AlphaGo 3-3 hit the headlines, one conclusion drawn was that pros had assumed ...

Gérard TAILLE wrote: Black to play and win

I must be missing something, what is the number of prisoners on each side?
At first sight, assumming no prisoners, black has 22 points, white has 14, so with komi 6.5 black won already.

Thank you for all the wonderful books! This one I even managed to find online and order a couple of days ago, before your announcement here :-)

Any plans to republish older books? I realize I don't have "The Insha Game: Honinbo Shusai versus Karigane Junichi" and a few others which Slate & Shell ...

The update is that they found a way to beat KataGo after giving it 9 stones handicap.

Article: https://goattack.far.ai/pdfs/go_attack_paper.pdf
KGS games: https://gokgs.com/gameArchives.jsp?user=corners&year=2023&month=1

Example game:
(;GM[1]FF[4]CA[UTF-8]AP[CGoban:3]ST[2]
RU[Japanese]SZ[19]HA[9 ...

Both "Games of Shuei" and the similarly large "Genjo - Chitoku" books arrived in perfect condition for me, you must have had bad luck... I would just return it and reorder, to get one without defects.

Seems like Amazon's printing service doesn't like them either. I finally decided to spend $80 for ...

I'm not a big watcher of pro games, but at least to me, Myeongwan stuck out to me as an "old-fashioned" player from the start, even from his third move:

$$Bc ...

Maybe there is a better way for black to play in the beginning, if the komi is 9.

I also liked the interview!
In particular, I found the quote below very interesting, namely that a small rule change such as "group tax" would make KataGo play more like Takemiya :-)
As an amateur, this means one has even more reason to play their own Go style, instead of trying to mimic AI, since ...

KataGo with komi set to zero has some unexpected suggestion.

The favorite is black "a" in the lower-left, which seems unusual by human standards. In fact I don't remember ever seeing this move in human pro play!
This way black is winning by 93.5%, 9 points ahead.
KataGo's 2nd choice is black "b ...

"My gospel is holier than your gospel", said BlackHole to KataGo: http://www.yss-aya.com/cgos/viewer.cgi?19x19/SGF/2020/06/25/702940.sgf

Interestingly, the several KataGo versions on CGOS all have very negative scores against the BlackHole bot: http://www.yss-aya.com/cgos/19x19/cross ...

The commonality I see between the 3-4 based shimari and the 4-4 based one is that they both prevent the opponent from playing a very desirable move (a keima approach).

That has a circular scent. Isn't the keima approach is a desirable move because it prevents the owner of the corner stone to ...

Personally, I don't like to think in too many categories (such as shimari 1, shimari 2, etc..).

The commonality I see between the 3-4 based shimari and the 4-4 based one is that they both prevent the opponent from playing a very desirable move (a keima approach).

In that sense, the 4-4 based ...

I suppose in the examples Elf agrees the side extension limits a moyo that needs limiting because it is thick and big, whereas in the first position Black's top side is nothing to be scared of so you shouldn't play locally bad move for non applicable global reasons.

Most players would, I think ...

I was thinking yesterday, while reading Bill's new series of threads, that the message I think AI is telling us is: "you can play anything you want, LITERALLY, in the beginning of the game, as long as you follow it up reasonably afterwards, and you don't make any bad mistakes". I know it is not ...