The uncertainty principle

[John Fairbairn]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/23685153

I think the above story is very relevant to go. I find the go scene rather boring at the moment, just waiting to see which new Chinese teenager emerges on top this week. Go was more fun when there was a bigger dollop of certainty: titles were fewer, they were anchored in a tradition, and specific rivalries were few but intense. I also feel that the Mickey Mouse time limits have put the balance between certainty and uncertainty out of kilter. It seems my feelings are close to the norm among sports fans.

[Splatted]

I kind of agree about right now, but I'm also very excited about future prospects. It seems to me that the scope and quality of go training has improved a lot in recent years and that makes it much harder for individuals to stand out from the crowd, but it also means that when a truly great player does appear they'll have the advantage of that excellent training. Imagine if the greatest players of past generations had that behind them. I think the next time we see a player capable of standing out from the crowd that they'll not only be the greatest player of this generation, but likely also the greatest go player that has ever lived.

[SmoothOper]

It is difficult to follow the action in Go. Iyama Yuta was just playing in two tournaments at the same time one international and one Japanese, and in Japan they didn't even wait for the one tournament to finish before starting the next. And that is just Japan. There is no off season, where the anointed royalty can revel in their superiority, after the season culminates in a crowning. I think this is always the the way the game has been, but only recently has the west been able to tune in as it happens.

[DrStraw]

I stopped following the international go scene years ago. There were just too many tournaments and too many players. I followed Japanese go for a little while longer, but even lost interest there when the familiar names from my early days stopped winning titles.

And as the article you quote is primarily about cricket, I also stopped paying any attention to the plethora of pseudo-cricket matches which are played these days and only pay attention to test cricket and Yorkshire first class matches.

[Boidhre]

This is a very good point I think. Every sport I can think of suffers if it gets too random or too predictable. In the former, fans want to be able to cheer on the same player/team for a long time and know their rivals, not in every event not having a clue where the threat is going to come from. In the latter, overly-one-sided games are never very interesting, they're very appealing to professional players normally but not fans.

[hyperpape]

I wonder what we'll think in a few years time. At the time, I felt like the period after I started following professional go in 2006 was full of new names, and everything was in flux, but in hindsight there was really one story going on: Yi Se-tol was the best for that period, and other players would periodically look like they were up to his level (Gu Li more than anyone else), but no one could match him over the course of several years.

Right now, it looks like things are in flux, but we have no way of knowing how long that will last.

Edit: minor clarification.

[SmoothOper]

I think it would be cool to have a webpage with the schedules of games and real time sgf streams of certain games. Though I don't think the ad funding is there.

[oren]

I think it would be cool to have a webpage with the schedules of games and real time sgf streams of certain games. Though I don't think the ad funding is there.

http://gogameguru.com/pro-go-calendar/

Virtually all the games are on wbaduk.

[SmoothOper]

I think it would be cool to have a webpage with the schedules of games and real time sgf streams of certain games. Though I don't think the ad funding is there.

http://gogameguru.com/pro-go-calendar/

Virtually all the games are on wbaduk.

Yay, I now have an account too!

[darkpolarbear]

We Chinese say it is the time of warlords about GO, and according to the experience from history of China, there will be a King showing up

[John Fairbairn]

http://www.chessvibes.com/luck-needed-i ... cup-part-i

On the assumption that having longer thinking times reduces the element of luck in the result, the above post seems to explain why Mickey Mouse time limits lead to (too) many different winners.

[skydyr]

Out of curiosity, what do you consider a mickey-mouse time limit, and at what point does it become reasonable?

[hyperpape]

John, that's an interesting hypothesis, and my first thought was that it absolutely made sense.

However, I then thought about the Japanese lightning and TV tournaments, which don't seem to have a proliferation of winners. Looking at the NHK, the Ryusei and the NEC, I see the same old names, and the same for the Asian TV Cup. So I'm not sure what to think about the idea.

[John Fairbairn]

However, I then thought about the Japanese lightning and TV tournaments, which don't seem to have a proliferation of winners. Looking at the NHK, the Ryusei and the NEC, I see the same old names, and the same for the Asian TV Cup. So I'm not sure what to think about the idea.

This is largely to do with seeding, so that titleholders or previous winners (or, until recently, higher dans) start much higher up the ladder.

I don't have a precise figure for a Mickey Mouse time limit but taking pro views put to me in person, it's anything fast enough to inhibit the players from counting accurately. They don't seem to need much time for reading, but evaluations cannot be speeded up easily. Japanese quickplay tournaments have traditionally tried to allow for this by giving each player a small number of "timeouts" when they can spend maybe a minute instead of the usual 10 seconds, or whatever.

[SmoothOper]

I still advocate for treating the different time limits as fundamentally different events. 1600m vs. 400m I think that was the original purpose for having the various tournaments, was to accommodate the different formats. Training for a ten game match vs one game match is quite different for example.