Ever wondered ....

SmoothOper · Post by **SmoothOper** » Fri Jul 12, 2013 6:34 am

Theoretically if everyone opened at different openings 8-8,7-8,8-9,9-5 there would be no standard openings.

In my opinion the standard openings being prevalent at top levels is due to the players learning to play at such a young age, and that the players are so heavily invested in those openings that they couldn't play a different opening if they wanted, it kind of reminds me of a game I saw where both players played non-standard corner openings but then at move forty, you couldn't tell that they hadn't just played hoshi points. I mean 12 years of research on a hoshi opening isn't going to happen overnight. Of course these young players are so strong, it takes a tectonic shift to dislodge them, and persuade them to think differently. Computer based research may lead to a situation, where a go program is able to prove that alternate openings are indeed better, or allow adept younger players to research new lines of play faster and independently of study groups, facilitating less hegemonous lines of play.

oren · Post by **oren** » Fri Jul 12, 2013 8:08 am

Or simply they would come back and find starting closer to the corners worked better to get their win rate higher.

Yamashita Keigo and many other players experimented for a time with tengen. The win rate was pretty much 50% but they were players whose career win rate was generally higher than that.

SmoothOper · Post by **SmoothOper** » Fri Jul 12, 2013 8:15 am

I forgot to mention, don't forget the handicap system encouraging hoshi play, as a ranking system discouraging people from exploring alternate plays while developing skills.

judicata · Post by **judicata** » Fri Jul 12, 2013 8:16 am

SmoothOper wrote:I forgot to mention, don't forget the handicap system encouraging hoshi play, as a ranking system discouraging people from exploring alternate plays while developing skills.

Since I more often lost as black (and still do) in handicap games, for a long while, handicap games encouraged me not to play 4-4 openings.

moyoaji · Post by **moyoaji** » Fri Jul 12, 2013 8:33 am

SmoothOper wrote:I forgot to mention, don't forget the handicap system encouraging hoshi play, as a ranking system discouraging people from exploring alternate plays while developing skills.

Well, if you go back 100 years the star point was not seen as a viable opening. The star point stone given as a handicap meant that you still didn't get any territory at the start of the game, only influence. Influence was not as highly valued before the shin-fuseki era. If you look at Shusaku's games the only opening moves were the 3-4 and 5-3. You'll also see that almost every approach to the komoku is low - a more territorial move. Even in handicap games white would play a 3-4 point away from the hoshi stone, which, according to Kajiwara Takeo in the Direction of Play, is something that shouldn't be done because it gives black an ideal approach situation since 4-4 stones are biased toward the sides.

The star point stone is a good example of how conventional thinking has given way to modern playing style. A move that was once seen as bad is now seen as the most common opening move in the game.

snorri · Post by **snorri** » Fri Jul 12, 2013 11:37 am

SmoothOper wrote:Theoretically if everyone opened at different openings 8-8,7-8,8-9,9-5 there would be no standard openings.

I've considered the following idea. Bring two 8-sided dice to a tournament. Whenever I'm black, roll them before my 1st move. Add two points to each number, and play that move. (So nothing starting on the 2nd line or below, which I guess we assume is inferior, despite the habits of certain Polish 4-dans.) I'm concerned about insulting people, though. I guess I can lessen the effect by not rolling the dice in front of them.

BTW, I don't think this makes sense as white. Once black has made a move, white has to immediately start thinking about what that move means in relation to future plays.

judicata · Post by **judicata** » Fri Jul 12, 2013 2:30 pm

snorri wrote:I've considered the following idea. Bring two 8-sided dice to a tournament. Whenever I'm black, roll them before my 1st move. Add two points to each number, and play that move. (So nothing starting on the 2nd line or below, which I guess we assume is inferior, despite the habits of certain Polish 4-dans.) I'm concerned about insulting people, though. I guess I can lessen the effect by not rolling the dice in front of them.

Occasionally, I would use a somewhat similar method on whether to check or raise some hands in poker (to add some unpredictability to my strategy). If a clock with seconds or a second hand was nearby, I'd check if it was under 30 seconds and raise if over 30. This would avoid the blatant rolling of dice in front of your opponent (although the irony/humor of seeing someone rolling dice while playing go favors the dice method). But no simple/clean way to relate the seconds to which points you use immediately comes to mind. Sure, you could assign different coordinates to different ranges of seconds, but that's a little forced.

ez4u · Post by **ez4u** » Fri Jul 12, 2013 2:36 pm

Wasiqi wrote:...
I'm reminded of this article

http://en.chessbase.com/home/TabId/211/PostId/4008047

...

Amazing article! Thanks for posting this link.

The posted article - 'Rajlich: Busting the King's Gambit, this time for sure' wrote:
How much processing time went into your project?

Approximately – well actually quite precisely – 10,750,000 hours of single-core CPU time. The King's Gambit run took a little over four months in total, elapsed time, to calculate.

That was on about 3000 cores, right? What was the system doing?
...

Will this take all of the creativity and flexibility out of opening play?

Quite the opposite. I think players will see that many surprising moves are playable, giving them more options to choose from. For example, take the game Topalov-Kramnik from Wijk aan Zee 2008. The genius of Topalov's preparation wasn't that 12.Nxf7 is some sort of great move. It was simply realizing that 12.Nxf7 is playable and doesn't lose by force. Once you establish that, it's not that hard to work out a way to put a ton of pressure on your opponent.
...

Okay, cough it up: what next?

I say this with some apprehension, but we've been looking at the 6.Bg5 Najdorf (10.e5! looks promising as a forced win for White). But if we decide to do the full classification we are going to need much faster hardware. Maybe a factor of a thousand over what we used for the King’s Gambit. There are companies that periodically test that kind of hardware for new server parks, and run very CPU-intensive applications on them to locate faulty processors. We have made contact with the technical director of the Google server farms, who was definitely interested. So maybe in a year or two we will have solved the Najdorf.
...

[Emphasis added]

Boidhre · Post by **Boidhre** » Fri Jul 12, 2013 3:02 pm

What's really scary there is that they didn't solve that opening position in 4 months and over 3000 cores, they merely tested a small fraction of the variations and assumed a win once either side had better than a 5 pawn advantage. This is a fairly reasonable assumption for top level players, yet it's a very long way from totally solving it. When you consider the extreme difficulty of accurately evaluating a go position in the midgame for a computer compared to how relatively easy it is for a chess engine...

SmoothOper · Post by **SmoothOper** » Fri Jul 12, 2013 6:25 pm

I wonder if there is an analog to the term gambit. Cho Chikun has a book in the mycom series, that google translate translates the title as gambits, I am tempted to get it, but I am afraid it won't be like the other problem books in the series. However, I gather risky plays are mostly avoided.

Here is the translation of the reviews I am talking about.

http://translate.google.com/translate?s ... nts%3D1%0A

It looks like there are more reviews saying that it is a problem book, it might be worth a try.

Boidhre · Post by **Boidhre** » Fri Jul 12, 2013 6:38 pm

Well a gambit in chess is an early sacrifice of material for positional or future gain. An analogy in go would be sacrificing a group of stones during the opening in exchange for "gaining a tempo or two" to develop faster globally or some other benefit. Crucially though, it can't be a forced capture for the opponent, the opponent would have to have the option of taking the stones or not. At its simplest it's just an offer of a trade of some stones and the attached territory for potential points very early in the game from my understanding.

SmoothOper · Post by **SmoothOper** » Fri Jul 12, 2013 7:00 pm

Boidhre wrote:Well a gambit in chess is an early sacrifice of material for positional or future gain. An analogy in go would be sacrificing a group of stones during the opening in exchange for "gaining a tempo or two" to develop faster globally or some other benefit. Crucially though, it can't be a forced capture for the opponent, the opponent would have to have the option of taking the stones or not. At its simplest it's just an offer of a trade of some stones and the attached territory for potential points very early in the game from my understanding.

I agree, that the analogy is odd, in the chess sense, gambits simplify the game with fewer pieces, whereas trading stones and leaving weak groups usually leaves aji, that can become very complicated. Maybe a better analogy would be making overly thick/heavy groups, and capturing groups too early in gote.

oren · Post by **oren** » Fri Jul 12, 2013 7:07 pm

They translates 'fuseki' to 'gambit'.

The title is just breakthrough to shodan, fuseki at a glance.

Bill Spight · Post by **Bill Spight** » Fri Jul 12, 2013 8:40 pm

On various plays in the opening:

Tengen.

1670.

I believe that when go had setup stones on diagonal 4-4 points, tengen was popular in medieval times. 14th century?

3-3 vs. 4-4.

1838.

yoyoma · Post by **yoyoma** » Fri Jul 12, 2013 8:42 pm

Wasiqi wrote:...
I'm reminded of this article

http://en.chessbase.com/home/TabId/211/PostId/4008047

...

This was an April fool's joke. I added emphasis below:

From the article wrote:On March 31 the author of the Rybka program, Vasik Rajlich, and his family moved from Warsaw, Poland to a new appartment in Budapest, Hungary. The next day, in spite of the bustle of moving boxes and setting up phone and Internet connections Vas, kindly agreed to the following interview, which had been planned some months ago.

Life In 19x19

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