A new free website where you can practice fuseki. My initial goal was to create a website where I could practice fuseki the way I want, but I'm hopeful it will prove useful to the go community in general.

http://www.Ootakamoku.com/

Common fuseki positions are shown from recent pro games, and you are asked to guess the next move. You rank is then estimated based your answers. In turn the positions shown to you are based on your rank. So after the first few positions you should start getting position that you can answer correctly 80% of the time. If you answer a position wrong, you will be shown the same position again at a later time, until you get it right. If you login via google, your answers and your rank will be remembered in future sessions, and you won't be shown positions you have already answered correctly.

It should work just fine on desktops as well as mobile devices, where there is a confirm click available. For now it only contains pro games from last 5 years, so older or outdated fuseki choices aren't always considered correct.

The website is still in beta, so any feedback is much appreciated. If you have any questions, you can check out the FAQ, or post your question here.

-Ootakamoku

Now I understand a cryptic (i.e. in Finnish) message you posted with an appspot URL a few weeks ago in KGS

Checked back then and liked it, but was afraid of registering (didn't know who made it heh) Now I will!

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

Very cool, thank you!

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

This is an interesting service. A few suggestions here:

* Use a symbol to mark the last move before the questions (this can be worked out most of the times but in real game this information is available)
* Consider remove problems with very obvious answers (such as stone under atari, or forcing moves in the middle of a common joseki)

The system apparently learns from very modern pro games. It doesn't like old fusekis. And it does not allow more creative moves. I am a 5-dan but I scored very badly initially until I started playing the most common moves. Occasionally, a perfectly reasonable move is considered 'WRONG'.

The system will clearly become more useful if the database backing it is much larger, and if a lot of people use it improving the accuracy of the difficulty ratings of each problem. For the former I can help - if you are interested in using my Go4Go database to back your system, please contact me.

First of all this is a very cool idea and a lot of fun, my suggestions:

- Like macelee I think that indicating the last move played would be of help, but keeping it as an optional feature would be even better
- I like the idea of showing the positions again that I got wrong, but sometimes it seems too recent, having something like 10 others between them would feel better before you see something twice(obv others might agree)
- The rank seems to be pretty inflated, the site ranks me 5 stones stronger than I actually am on kgs, not top priority, but a little more correlation would be nice.
- I understand that that the sample games seem to be from pro games mostly, but especially weaker players like me see a lot of whacky openings in reality. Right now it seems like the problems are really good for teaching you to not make mistakes, but teaching you how to punish your opponents mistakes seems like a desirable skill to develop as well.

Anyway, for a thing still in beta this is really good, well done sir.

My intention to leave it out was based on instilling the habit of analyzing the whole board, and not pay so much attention to what was most recently played. While this information would be available in real game it should not affect the move you play, at most it gives a meta aspect into what opponent is thinking. To my surprise its almost only stronger players who have complained about this, tho I guess to them its a nice convenience factor as they would analyze the whole board anyways.



These will probably end up with quite a low difficulty rating after a while, and thereby be mostly shown to double digit kyus. Where they will hopefully serve as a good first step into deciding where where to play on a board.



Indeed the site is more about learning the established and prevalent fusekis. I recently relaxed the requirements for what moves are considered acceptable. A "correct" answer was a move that at very least 1/4th as often played as the most popular choice on the board. Tho even moves that are only played 1/16 as often as the most popular choice was accepted without a complaint, however these wouldn't affect your rating. A bit like, the site is uncertain if its really right or wrong so it ignores the answer. Anything less than 1/16th as often was considered wrong even if there was an example of it being played by a pro. The new relaxed requirements are 1/5th and 1/25th, but they haven't had time to propagated throughout the system yet.



That sounds great, I'll contact you regarding this.



Actually, you are only shown the correct answers when you click something wrong. Its several hours until it asks the position again. Tho in some cases there might be a bug that causes it to be shown anew right away. Another alternative is that you are shown positions with some minor difference, like the opposing corners stone is hoshi instead of komoku etc.



The site learns how to rank players, based on the ranking information provided by other players. So it should improve over time. And of course, since its measuring fuseki knowledge, how good/bad one is at fuseki can make a difference too. For the time being most 5kyus and weaker will probably get slightly inflated ratings.



True, yet very often the first principle about punishment is to not rush it. Many positions punishment is just continuing the game, and letting opponent have his 2 extra points traded for weaker shape. As for the more violent kind of punishment, its about fighting skills, which are in the category of l&d and tesujis. I will probably include those at a later date.

I like it (but then again I’m just ~13k, and what do I know!?)

One suggestion for better mnemosomething: I think, at least for my old eyes and brains it would help of the last board with the suggestions would not just disappear after my click but rather fade out for short time, perhaps after a very short mild flash or something, so to create something of an after-image on my retina. I’m not joking. For me, even a short, “electric” “bzzz” sound would help, but I can imagine that would annoy many people. But please consider letting the “correct” moves stand for a short time after the click. ~0.2 sec fadeout (to blank board) would be perfect, I think.

Whatever—I love it already.

Thanks, Tom

<edit>

Now I realize there already seem to be such features, I’ve just not found out how and when exactly which appear

</edit>


<edit #2>

I really like that flash, BTW, but apparently it works like the neuralyzer—afterwards I seem to have forgotten who I am what it was about

</edit #2>

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

Wow, that's addictive. I got in 326 answers before I realized what was happening.

A good bug to fix would be to add something to the script to remove immediate repetition. I got the exact same position twice in a row about 5 times over the course of those problems. The ranking seems fairly accurate for my level - after that large number of problems I got to 4.0-3.7 kyu which is about my KGS rank. I think repetition after 10 or so problems is actually good as it helps to hammer home the ideas, but it shouldn't come twice in a row.


pak0, in our teaching game your fuseki was really good. When you took the time to play out the moves you played proper joseki and your direction of play was also decent. The rating may be inflated, but your knowledge of the opening is good for your level as well.

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"You have to walk before you can run. Black 1 was a walking move.
I blushed inwardly to recall the ignorant thoughts that had gone through
my mind before, when I had not realized the true worth of Black 1."
-Kageyama Toshiro on proper moves

Apparently I fell for katteyomi. I thought the site was working "flawlessly" when I posted about it here, but I was wrong. For new users there was a bug, that caused them to get totally random board positions for first 100 problems, not at all tuned to their rank. It should be fixed now.

What constitutes enough data for your model?

I came across this position:

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$B
$$ +---------------------------------------+
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . O . . . . . , . . . . . X . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . X . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . b . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . O . . , . . . |
$$ | . . . O . . . . . . . . a . . X . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ +---------------------------------------+[/go]

I've 56 games for this position in my database. White's approach here is rather a lot less common than a and b here. I'm curious what your cutoff is here for viable moves for white? I really like the site idea, I'm more curious about the algorithm here than anything else.

Right now I'm only using games since 2011, but I plan to add a few more years worth of games to give a bit more diversity to possible answers. Tho I dont want to go too far because some older fusekis are considered inferior and not just out of fashion.

Also, you can link directly to the board position on the site from the tsumego sections "link to answers".

Sorry, I've moved far past it. If I spot it again I'll link it.


2011 seems an unusually recent date? Perhaps offer "styles" or groups of particular pros for people? It might be interesting. E.g. someone studying Shukasu might find it interesting to go through fuseki questions based on his games. Ditto perhaps someone looking at Lee Changho or Lee Sedol. I don't know, just musing.

Indeed features somewhat similar to what you suggest here are already planned. I just want to ensure the existing functionality works smoothly first.

Once the site starts zeroing in on a rating, it seems pretty unwilling to revise its opinion. Thus in the three times I've tried so far, twice I've gotten off to a bad start and wound up with a rating around 8k, and once I got off to a good start and got a (more accurate (imo)) rating of 3-4k.

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Patience, grasshopper.

Totally understandable. This could be quite a flexible tool. Someone with enough time and patience could create problem sets aimed at various ranks or types of game (I'm really not thinking of the goproblems.net mess of problems here) It might be difficult to convince someone sufficiently strong to do it for free though.

Anyway, thank you. Very interesting project.

The rating you are shown is actually based only on roughly the previous 100 answers you have given. In the evenings when I'm tired and careless my rating often goes down by 2-3 stones, compared to what it gives me when I can maintain better concentration. You should sign in, so you can continue from where you left off, without having to establish a rank anew every time. That way you also wont e shown the same problems (except as a reminder to help you memorize those you made a mistake in the first time). Also as I'm constantly improving upon the site, and gathering more data from users, the site is better able to evaluate users rank.

26 questions answered and I am 11-12k. Guess I'll return that dan certificate.

Fun app Ootakamoku.

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- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

I like what I see in that site. Ill make an acct today or my next set of days off.

Ill let the higher level players comment on how it works (other than technical, computer related issues) because I'm too new a Go player......but I can see how it might help me improve!

good site, it's helpful and enjoyable

I have a little bit of experience with interactive testing, but can hardly claim expertise.

May I suggest that you show positions that you expect that the person can answer "correctly" 50% of the time. There are two reasons for this. First, you get maximum information from whether the answers are correct or not. Second, learning tasks on which the learner succeeds about half the time are generally best, both in terms of the amount of information conveyed to the learner and in terms of motivation.



That's not a bug. When you match test questions to the estimated ability of the test taker without first giving questions over a range of difficulty, you get a random walk. Given the variety of opening positions to present, may I suggest submitting 25 positions evenly covering the full range of difficulty before making the first estimate of the person's ability. Yes, 100 is too many, but I think that 10 is too few.

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The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.