GoGoD Summer 2016

[John Fairbairn]

The summer update of the GoGoD database is now available at www.gogodonline.co.uk. This edition has just under 88,000 games.

For me the highlight of the edition is a new game by Huang Longshi (thanks to Tom Koranda). I've also been concentrating on the 1920s this time. I already mentioned in my book Old Fuseki vs New Fuseki that while Kitani and Go Seigen got the credit for inventing New Fuseki, they were really just riding the crest of a wave of experimentation begun by others. It's interesting now to see how much New Fuseki was being prefigured even earlier than the early 1930s. This period also features some rare games by Chinese players. One highlight was a three-day game by Wang Zian in which he managed to get a jigo on 2-stones against Segoe. That sheds a strong sidelight on just how strong the Chinese were when Go Seigen burst on the scene a little later.

For Windows users, this edition includes (though on an unsupported basis) at no extra cost a copy of the database-search program GoLibrary, which quite a few people seem to like. It's unsupported because it was written in Delphi, which I can no longer use on my machine and I haven't got time to convert it to Visual C#. But it's been around for years and is apparently bug-free - I use it several times a day, and it seems fine on Windows 10.