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 Post subject: Re: why do tsumegos have exactly one solution?
Post #1 Posted: Mon Nov 12, 2018 7:10 am 
Judan

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Not tsumegos in general have exactly one solution but quite a few collections follow this tradition. Other collections have every number of solutions to train this variety occurring in played games. Among the solutions, there can be a finer differentiation by score or other aspects.


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 Post subject: Re: why do tsumegos have exactly one solution?
Post #2 Posted: Sun Nov 18, 2018 6:52 pm 
Dies in gote

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The historical understanding of Tsumego in Japan, at least the good ones, is that it has only one solution. (Or to be accurate, it has only one correct move for the first move.) It is supposed to be a mental life and death quiz, and akin to other mental games like Sudoku or crosswords, it feels strange to have more than one solution. The others are simply called life and death exercises/problems or tesuji exercises/problems etc. Many, but definitely not all, books written in Japanese language still follow this definition.

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Post #3 Posted: Sun Nov 18, 2018 8:49 pm 
Honinbo
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does the player/color going first has a name?
There's no special name in chess, either, yes ? Black to mate; or White to mate.

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 Post subject: Re: why do tsumegos have exactly one solution?
Post #4 Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2018 2:01 am 
Honinbo

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kyulearner wrote:
The historical understanding of Tsumego in Japan, at least the good ones, is that it has only one solution. (Or to be accurate, it has only one correct move for the first move.)


I question that. Perhaps John Fairbairn, or others who are more knowledgeable than I could chime in on that question. I have not run across anything like the chess idea of a cook, by which a problem is spoiled if a different solution is found. I do think that modern problems do attempt to have a single first move, but I question whether that esthetic prevailed in earlier times.

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Post #5 Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2018 2:03 am 
Honinbo

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hismaimai8888 wrote:
In a tsumego, does the player/color going first has a name? A tori and uke concept might come in handy when discussing. I call it black in this post.


The player going first may be called the first player. :)

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 Post subject: Re: why do tsumegos have exactly one solution?
Post #6 Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2018 3:22 am 
Oza

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Quote:
The historical understanding of Tsumego in Japan, at least the good ones, is that it has only one solution. (Or to be accurate, it has only one correct move for the first move.) It is supposed to be a mental life and death quiz, and akin to other mental games like Sudoku or crosswords, it feels strange to have more than one solution. The others are simply called life and death exercises/problems or tesuji exercises/problems etc. Many, but definitely not all, books written in Japanese language still follow this definition.


This is not quite accurate. Mixing history and present-day practice is a recipe for confusion. Tsumego (or, historically, tsumemono) originally did not include semeai positions (which had a separate name), but nowadays they do, so there has been that change over time. There has been a change also in the presentation of the problems. The original practice was to ask "Black to play - with what result?" Nowadays, the problem is likely to be more specific: "How does Black capture White?" Also, it is common now to add a hint. A moment's thought will show that a hint tends to imply a single solution.

And that probably underlies the biggest change over time: the artificial single-solution problem. Historical problems were "miniature positions" - that is what tsumemono means. They were mostly taken (it is believed) from real games, with all the messiness about possible first moves and solutions that implies.

The Meijin Inseki was probably the first Japanese player to devise a large corpus of problems himself (Sansa cribbed from Chinese sources so we can't count him), but Inseki was more concerned with themes and difficulty (as forms of instruction) than with aesthetics. Aesthetics were not absent but tended to be in the form of allusions to literature and the like, as shown by the name of the problem.

The drive towards an inherent aesthetic did not come about until the 1950s when the likes of Maeda Nobuaki and Fujisawa Hideyuki began discussing the theory behind it. Fujisawa in particular could be said to have enunciated the idea of a single solution, but not quite in the sense of avoiding a cook. He was more interested in the concept of a surprising move, which almost by definition has to be unique. In any case it was always the tesuji (the combination) that mattered most.

These views took over somewhat, but larded by hints, as the market for single tsumego (i.e. not thematic series) in magazines and newspapers took off.

The very fact that Fujisawa and others felt the need to talk about a new aesthetic tells us that there had been a sea-change in the understanding of what tsumego is about. We can see this also in the writing of Shioiri Itsuzo, who became notorious for lambasting famous pro colleagues for stealing go problems for sale to the media. (His earlier 15 minutes of fame was as the young scorekeeper who spotted a tesuji that both Go Seigen and Fujisawa Kuranosuke missed in their 1951 ten-game match.)

Apart from that censure, he also said this - which shows the sea was changing around 1950:

Quote:
Next, something I would like to offer advice on is the matter of hints in tsumego problems. Although previously there have been many problems published where they ask for the result, recently there has been a nasty practice of not only clarifying whether it is life, death or ko but also of even going so far as to give a hint. It is as if, in a detective novel, there were ten suspicious characters but the author states that the actual criminal is one of three names, A, B or C. This would be an affront to true fans. Since the addition of a hint to a tsumego problem without the permission of the author of the problem in the first place is a desecration of a creative work, I would like to see this cease completely forthwith.


However, a newspaper column would not provide space for many variation diagrams, so in that sense it was necessary to have problems with a single problem that could be explained easily, and the hint would be part of that. Aesthetics did not come into it.

A couple of further quotes from Shioiri will show that other changes were taking place:

Quote:
For the most part I have written without reserve. Let me next touch on the creators of tsumego problems. First, hardly anyone would dispute that the title of yokozuna of the East [first place in sumo rankings] should be given to Maeda Nobuaki 8-dan. His “Tsumego Collection”, it goes without saying, those problems published every month in specialist magazines and newspapers, and in the general monthly and weekly magazines, are all works that feature Maeda’s screwball style to good effect and give the feeling that the possibilities of tsumego are surely inexhaustible. I am not praising him because he was my teacher, but because he has been the number one in tsumego past and present.

The yokozuna of the West is Hashimoto Utaro 9-dan of the Kansai Ki-in. Here again there will be no complaints if we say his “Tsumego Problems for the 53 Stages of the Tokaido” is a splendid work which is a new style of tsumego book, totally lacking the formality of previous books and giving a feeling of his genius. Apart from the problems in this book, all his works have fresh ideas and it is a pleasure to look at them. The problems he offers every month total about sixty, and he seems always to have about three hundred “in stock”, but as they do get used up he says he composes a problem every night without fail before going to bed. He is a genius not only in go proper but also in tsumego.


So we see that Maeda is doing something new: and screwball different. Hashimoto is doing something new, too. He had a couple of famous books in which he named a problem after each stage of a journey (i.e. a problem instead of a haiku as in Basho's case), so we can see was not so much concerned with the inherent aesthetics of the problem as with recalling the glories of Japan (this was valuable in the period of post-war reconstruction).

Incidentally, Shioiri reserves his greatest admiration (which he said was shared by other pros) for the almost unknown Sato Sunao.

He is a little sniffy about Fujisawa, though:

Quote:
Fujisawa Hideyuki 7-dan has a good stock of problems, and those already published include many fine ones, but they seem a little too difficult to be popular.


And about Takagawa Kaku:

Quote:
The Honinbo, Takagawa Kaku, perhaps under pressure from the sheer number of monthly and weekly magazines, has produced a mixture of gems and rocks.


He has strong words of praise for Sugiuchi Masao and Sakata Eio, but these are matched by esteem for the amateur Narita Junichi (an esteem which even Maeda shared). But, in a remark I think we can all empathise with, he adds:

Quote:
It is depressing that, because even amateurs can produce good tsumego problems, I can devote myself to producing them and yet cannot earn much money from them.


In all the many words Shioiri wrote about tsumego, not once did he mention single solutions. Except in the special case of ensuring a problem ended in unequivocal life or death or ko but not both, a single solution has not really been part of any debate. As far as I can recall the only writer to get close that was Fujisawa, but not only, as already mentioned, did he re-cast that idea as the "surprising" move, for him it was just one of (from memory) seven characteristics of a good problem.

In practice, of course, a single first move is usually expected, but for that reason - practicality, not aesthetics.

In any case, among present-day tsumego buffs aesthetics has to do with the composer's style, not "rules." This includes things like how many stones are used (some add stones for distraction, others deprecate that), how many layers of tesujis there are, similarities (and thus preparation for unexpected twists) to existing problems, how deep the "surprising" move is, and so on.


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 Post subject: Re: why do tsumegos have exactly one solution?
Post #7 Posted: Sat Nov 24, 2018 7:14 pm 
Dies in gote

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If you will allow me to return to my previous reply on this topic, below is a site which stipulates conditions to submit a problem to a tsumego magazine (currently discontinued), which includes among others, that there be only one correct move as the first move.
Unfortunately this is only in Japanese language

http://www.h-eba.com/heba/tumego/tsukamoto/tsuku06.html

Recognizing that we might be too rigid, we still expect any other move other than the correct one should be refuted and describe tsumego problems with more than one correct move, for the first move, as a "null problem" for a tsumego, but it is all right for a life and death problem.

Hence the answer to the OP's question.

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