For the past six months or so, I've been working on a web app in my spare time. I was hoping to have a functional beta going by congress, but it's a complex project and I'm busy.
What it will be: The website will help users memorize joseki. [But that's bad, you say? See note.]
Why am I doing this: I'm unhappy with current resources.
How will it work?: I'll post more details on that once I'm ready for people to start trying it.
Where do I get the list of joseki: They are automatically extracted from professional games (specifically, the 60,000+ games of GoGoD). This allows me to be pretty confident I won't be teaching people something stupid from Kogo's.
What the website is right now: The browse page allows you to look up josekis in my automatically generated tree. When you play the joseki on the board, you'll see some ghostly stones on the rest of the board. These stones are the average of the rest of the board when the joseki appears in professional games-- in other words, they answer the question, "What does the board look like when pros play this joseki?"
I hope you will all take a look. I still have a lot left to do, but I think it's already quite useful and I'm ready to have more than just three people look at it. It's been tested on Firefox and Chrome. I don't know how fast it will run if you all visit it at once...
Note "It's bad to just memorize joseki!!1!1!! You must understand every move!!!1!":
A) I do not prevent you from trying to understand why the moves are what they are.
B) Josekis will always be memorized in the context of one or more pro games.
C) Having something memorized should make it easier to make choices in a game: you know what a reasonable result should look like.
D) If nothing else, memorizing joseki should teach you something about shape.
E) If you use your newfound powers for evil and attempt to violently punish moves just because pros don't play them, you will lose games. You've been warned.
