Life In 19x19

Abyssinica wrote:

tentano wrote:I tried to solve this for not-a-ko for a long while before spotting the solution.

$$B Problem 227
$$ -----------------
$$ | . . O X O . . . . .
$$ | . X . X O . . . . .
$$ | X . X X O . . . . .
$$ | O O O O O . . . . .
$$ | . . . . . . . . . .

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$B Problem 227
$$ -----------------
$$ | . . O X O . . . . .
$$ | . X . X O . . . . .
$$ | X . X X O . . . . .
$$ | O O O O O . . . . .
$$ | . . . . . . . . . .[/go]

$$B Problem 227 read more accurately
$$ -----------------
$$ | . . O X O . . . . .
$$ | . X . X O . . . . .
$$ | X . X X O . . . . .
$$ | O O O . O . . . . .
$$ | . . . O . . . . . .
$$ | . . . . . . . . . .

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$B Problem 227 read more accurately
$$ -----------------
$$ | . . O X O . . . . .
$$ | . X . X O . . . . .
$$ | X . X X O . . . . .
$$ | O O O . O . . . . .
$$ | . . . O . . . . . .
$$ | . . . . . . . . . .[/go]

Dammit. I really do have functional eyes.

I felt so silly...

I was staring at the original thinking it's nothing BUT ko and THEN click the spoiler....

Damn, same

By the by... if you're the guy who did the mobile versions at tasuki's site, thanks for that. It's a lot nicer to look at on my phone than the regular versions.

tentano wrote:By the by... if you're the guy who did the mobile versions at tasuki's site, thanks for that. It's a lot nicer to look at on my phone than the regular versions.

Guilty I'm glad you found them useful!

Four losses in a row ...

Each time, I misread a situation. Exactly the one point I've been working on all week.

Even an ego as massive as my own takes damage under these circumstances.

There is, obviously, only one solution: moar tsumego.

I mean, it's only been just one week. Clearly that's nowhere near enough to attain god-like insight.

I still wish it gave me 1/16 god-like insight. 1/32. Something. Giveth a sign!

How the tables turn ...

Today featured a game in which I took two handicap stones against someone who misread a ladder and walked it all the way.

I'd heard before that western kyus are notorious for "not even being able to read a ladder", but I rarely get to see it in action.

Apart from the ladder, there were two group kills to mourn for my unfortunate opponent, too. I feel a lot better to have this overwhelming victory after yesterday.

tentano wrote:I'd heard before that western kyus are notorious for "not even being able to read a ladder", but I rarely get to see it in action.

Also eastern kyus.

Kyus are just terrible, full stop.

Added a list of problem collection titles to the top post.

Trying to be ORGANIZED. Or at least less disorganized.

Having made that edit, I realize that it will take months to dig through all that in a meaningful way.

At least I don't have a lack of quality tsumego collections. I just hope that half a year from now, I'll actually be substantially sick of tsuI MEAN improved in reading.

I guess for december my goal is to retire the easiest set and pick a slightly harder one to add on top of the remaining four. It's time to retire a set when it can be completed by me in under an hour with absolute certainty about each answer (including not just where the first move goes, but also why there and not elsewhere, and how it plays out). That's the criteria I used for the ones already in retirement.

Have you tried the Gokyo Shumyo to make your day agonising?

Gokyo Shumyo is still too hard to use for my present goal.

It should eventually not be, but for now it's way beyond my scope.

They take me at least 5 minutes each to solve. Far too slow.

Haven't spent that much time on tsumego the past two days, but the 300-400 range of Cho's E seems much tougher than the earlier ones.

Much to my chagrin, I've already had three problems (out of the first 40) where I could only find the solution by doing a tree search. This is roughly the same thing as having to look up the answer, except it takes longer. I simply take every remotely possible first move and for each one, I try to refute it. At least one of them should not be refutable, or the tsumego is bad.

I couldn't see the vital point, I couldn't see how it would play out and the only reason I will know in future is because I kept rehearsing the failed problems over and over in my mind because I was angry I couldn't see the solution at all.

Now that I'm not ambivalent about whether I can solve a problem, my attitude is very different from when I was just entertaining myself. Each one MUST be solved. Each one MUST be understood. By changing the goal, I've fundamentally changed the activity. I'd say it's less entertaining, but also more fulfilling. It feels like I'm winning something, in a way I wasn't before.

Added a sidequest: Attack and Defense by Ishida/Davies. I don't know what I might get out of this, but it breaks the monotony of only tsumego.

I seem to have developed tsumegitis. I've been trying to kill EVERYTHING in today's games. This is fantastic practice, but also leads to a 40% win ratio. Also highly entertaining.

I checked out the gostyle webapp at http://gostyle.j2m.cz/webapp.html and it accuses me of being very novel and very fighting (8+ on both). It also accused me of being 4k, which made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

I also checked http://style.baduk.org/style/index.php? and it told me I was flexible. Again, warm fuzzies.

Feeling positive about my development, despite there being no actual rank improvement on KGS.

My heart always tells me there's absolutely nothing wrong with trying to kill everything in sight on the board, even if my head tells me otherwise.

Sadly my heart often wins the argument.

You're not alone

Also never heard of that website before, got to check it out now....

Somehow my KGS equivalent strength is 2k ± 2.63.... But my rank on KGS is 4K

PeterN

PeterN wrote:Somehow my KGS equivalent strength is 2k ± 2.63.... But my rank on KGS is 4K

Somehow, the webapp ranks my account at 5d ± 2.63. Is 2.63 a magic number?

When analyzing a KGS user, wouldn't it make sense to set your "KGS equivalent strength" to, say, your KGS rank?

Well, that's what the confidence interval is for, I guess. They've got fancy maths at work to guess the strength of the player, rather than just read whatever KGS says your rank is. It's bound to be a bit fuzzy. I'm already impressed they can keep it within a range of five-ish stones just by automated analysis.

Unless they're just way off sometimes. If 200-300 people could just take that test and report back to me, I'd have a reasonable statistical sample to estimate how accurate it is. I'm sure the authors would like that data too... and then they'd modify their software so the data from that survey becomes obsolete and it will need to be redone.

Science is so much FUN.