Life In 19x19

There is an interesting post on Reddit in the DataIsBeautiful board, in which the author produced a visual representation of the evolution of go openings over time as a decision tree. The lack of labels makes it difficult to see what the openings are, but the data is certainly beautiful.

The post ...

This argument has always struck me as weird, if not fallacious. Every player, recreational or professional, will partly play moves they "understand", partly go for some adventure and in between play moves they might not understand but have seen from pros or AI. You don't know in advance whether ...

My general feeling is the pincers fell into disuse because the AIs didn't play them, and playing AI moves was a fad. Professional play seems to be a bit faddish as well. However, when you look with an AI, the pincers don't come off too badly. They're certainly in any reasonable list of candidate ...

Food for thought: are you "accepting" influence in these games, or is it being thrust upon you by opponents who are scooping out the corners and sides?

If it's the latter, then you may want to focus on your tactics to get a more even result around the edges.

Happy new year to our go playing friends in Australia!

An interesting position, to be sure. A few thoughts, both of my own and with a bit of help from katago. Much of this may be a little rambling, but hopefully it will stir some discussion.

I find it helpful to consider expectations before ...

My first question is: what is it about this position that makes it so hard for strong amateurs to count? My second question is: what made Takagawa resign. Takagawa's own answer to the latter question is illuminating in more ways than one ...

To give an example: let's say we have three boundary plays left, in reverse sente (RS) and gote (G): 5 RS, 12 G, and 10 G.
...
Now lets look at FOUR moves left: 5 RS, 12 G, 10 G, 6 G. Still black thinks 5 RS and 12 G are bound up together, sees 10 G on the board and decides to play 5 RS, white 12 ...

There is much to unpack here. I have wondered the same thing about the North American and the larger go world--how many pros can we support and do we have enough talent to fill those spots?

Michael Chen won the last North American pro qualifier. It was well deserved and nobody disputes his ...

I was pleased to see the news. Congratulations to Demis.

AI really seems to be on a roll this year. John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton won the Physics prize for their foundational work on AI as well.

I've decided to do some focused study on a few lines of play, mostly new joseki etc. In the pre-AI days this would involve firing up the database and printing off some game records of interest. Is it possible to do something similar with AI? I'd like to have KataGo (or some other AI) self-play a ...

So it seems that you mean connections in long-range connections. In KataGo's play, they are not a vital aspect because KataGo also considers sacrifices, incl. those of whole groups.

Your point about being willing to sacrifice is well made. I'm sure it's all in the KataGo neural net, but it's ...

Nice!

What you call the middle, I can relate to "Go Seigen groups", a concept introduced by John (again), due to Go Seigen writing & playing in this sense.

I'm not entirely sure the concept is a Go Seigen group, although I'd take your word for it if it was. The 'middle' or perhaps 'in-between ...

After a fair bit of time I am pleased to report that I have worked my way through John's Games of Shuei. Each of Shuei's magical moves have been lovingly placed on a physical go board and duly considered. Not sure if it counts as effortful practice, but there was certainly some effort involved ...

If you're wedded to leela-zero and lizzie I can't help you. If you're just interested in getting some AI going, I had fairly quick success with katrain (https://github.com/sanderland/katrain). I ended up having to build katago from source on an Ubuntu system, but that was without difficulty.

Good ...

Now listed on US and Canada Amazon. ASIN is B0D3Y3JBQ5, ISBN-13 is 979-8879025507.

Looking forward to it, John.