Life In 19x19

Reviewing my game with Katago, I noticed how indifferent it is to where to play in very early game. Out of interest, for the example below I checked every move on 3rd line or above, up to tengen. (Well, not every move because I did it manually, but every move near the stones on board plus a sampling ...

I suppose in Bill's last diagram there's a white stone missing (move 18) from top right.

You really think this is good paraphrase? I dont think so. There are things we cant "enclose" in mathemathical formulas (like results of integral of sin(x^2) cant be described by elementary functions, only infinite sum ) etc. So the fact that we can produce such a formula (even if its completely ...

My best and most honest answer is that I'm incurably neurotic. :)

My slightly less honest but a bit more practical answer is that IMO, the easier it is to get to a million playouts (for any move, not just move 0), the better. For instance, there is a slight possibility that, with enough play-outs ...

Zbaduk is great! I use it all the time instead of my older cumbersome cloud gpu setup. I bought a 3-month subscription too and it's well worth the price.

One issue: KGS sgf's don't work when they have lot of comments. Zbaduk only shows the game up to the move with the offending comment. Probably ...

ZBaduk is great! The issue I'm having is that I cannot analyze handicap games. The handicap stones do not show in the UI. Ive tried it with files from OGS or KGS that work fine with Lizzie and LeelaZero.

This move indeed kills something .
Was it the move you had in mind? I think white can play A8 to save half the group in sente, but I don't know if it was actually played.

A8? And not B11? What am I not seeing?

A8 allows connection to lower left by B6, shown below. This is a good shape to know ...

I'll drink less beer than in 2019. It's go-related, because I mostly drink while playing go.

Removing castling could be a great way to have fewer draws. I doubt it will catch on because every good chess player has spent half of their lives learning their opening repertoires and strategies, and most of that effort would go to waste after the change.

My recollection of the 'Direction of Play' is that it contained a lot of very subtle, high level examples and ideas that are not very meaningful for amateur play. And probably not professional play either, when bots have shown that many subtle high level pro ideas are just wrong.

So, to make it more explicit, if black plays 1-5, white will just play a move that saves the cutting stones, e.g. either of the 5-6 points. Now, as Bill said, the bottom 4 black stones cannot be saved anymore.

By the way, I'm not sure which 1-5 you mean. If you mean one on the bottom row, maybe you ...

I tried playing that bot with black, 0 handicap. If I play tengen or 3-2 I always win and can capture all white stones. If I play 2-2 I almost always win too, but I can see it is not playing the best moves, so I am not sure if I should win.

I am not sure what is most useful to you, to continue ...

Jika, have you seen 'Interactive way to go': m
I noticed a version of it is still up. That where I started 16 years ago. That's really for actual beginners and you don't need to know anything beforehand. It uses flash though, but at least it worked in my browser.

EDIT: Funny I missed Knotwilg ...

You said you've looked at sensei's library, but I'll put here two links anyway, because they look like relevant material:
https://senseis.xmp.net/?IntroductionToLifeAndDeath
https://senseis.xmp.net/?LifeAndDeath

But it's not very clear to me what kind of situations you find confusing, so would be best you post some examples here.

LeelaZero (should be about latest network) did not find the correct answer in 1.5 million playouts either, though it spent 6k playouts on the correct move at some point. It also thought white is losing. When I showed the correct answer, it took 50k playouts or so to see that it works and white has ...