In the past two or three years or so I have come across a special type of diagram in Gekkan Go World, and other places such as a Hikaru no Go video game.

Rather than me messing around trying to upload an image only to end up killing the cat (which we don't have - so no animals will have been harmed in the making of this post), try to draw a pentagon, and join each apex to the centre. Draw, or imagine, calibration marks down each line, enough say to score 1 to 10.

Imagine next that each apex and its line represent an aspect of go. The Hikaru no Go one is typical. One is for "fuseki" (meaning, here, spreading one stones out), one is for "making eyes", one is for "defence", one is for "attack" and the last is for "capturing races". (This is for beginning children. An equivalent for advanced players might include things like, fuseki, joseki, middle game, endgame, tsumego, tenacity, and so on).

A player's go ability is scored and marked on each line, and the calibration points so marked are joined up to create, within the overall regular pentagon, a smaller pentagon that is usually distorted. Typically this small pentagon is coloured in and gives a quick visual assessment of that player's strengths and weaknesses.

My questions are these:

1. Does this tool actually have a name?

2. Is it at all widely used? (Or was it, and it's passed its sell-by date?)

3. Is it any good?

4. Can you do anything else with it?

5. Is a pentagon usual? Why not 6, 7, 8-sided figures? (Maybe five is considered the most that the brain absorbs easily in a quick assessment?)

It's a common Japanese thing to have stats in a shape in lots of popular culture things. It's not just pentagons.




For example.

The video game DDR does something similar to rate song difficulty. I can't remember if it uses a five or six sided shape, though.

The thread title got me thinking about the US military... I'm not sure if I'd want them to learn go or not...

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
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My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

Let me guess, is that Naruto himself?

Wikipediaaaaaa -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_chart

Might be interesting. This page is hell to find when you can't remember what it's called.

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Revisiting Go - Study Journal
My Programming Blog - About the evolution of my go bot.

My eldest two daughters both had their school reports summarise their performance in one of these charts

Just out of curiosity, what is this video game that you talking about?

For what it's worth, I think these kinds of charts don't convey information very effectively. A bar chart or histogram makes it easier to compare relative differences in values. The area taken up by the chart isn't usually meaningful, and is visually distracting. Edward Tufte has a similar argument somewhere against pie charts.