Life In 19x19

Instead of trying to prove or disprove the untestable, let's just say that Shusaku was a truly tremendous player from whom you can really learn a great deal. Does it matter all that much which pro or go saint you study? You can learn from them all.

shapenaji wrote:

Laman wrote:

judicata wrote:Nice. All of the games are also in GoGoD (and many other databases)--I also like to follow along that way, and it is easier to use an sgf even when you're placing stones on a real board.

EDIT: A quick comment on your blog entry--I would say that Shusaku is inarguably one of the greatest go players of all time, and is arguably the greatest go player of all time (not that he is arguably one of them).

i would add that Shusaku is arguably one of the most overestimated players of all time

or, to be fair, his strength is hard to evaluate because he died young and thus had played majority of his games with an advantage of having black (being under-ranked). if he had lived longer, he could have proved his superiority better

I don't think he's overestimated, I think he just suffers from an overabundance of publicity. Pros agree that he's among the strongest along with Go Seigen/Huang Longshi/Dosaku/Lee Changho.

And he really had quite a lot of games. (The Jubangos with Ota Yuzo obviously). It's not just the 20 or so Castle games...

Shusaku's memory seems to benefit from (suffer from?) a Buddy Holly-esque career, where due to a premature death no one is quite sure where he would peak. We have the benefit of seeing the young challenger rapidly rising, but have no aging master stage to really give him a thorough vetting, where he is the one the new generation is challenging. For a thought experiment -- What would we think of Lee ChangHo if something happened and his career was ended in the late 1990s? Or Cho Chikun in the Early 80's? We would only be left to speculate what heights they may be able to attain.

Tami wrote:Instead of trying to prove or disprove the untestable, let's just say that Shusaku was a truly tremendous player from whom you can really learn a great deal. Does it matter all that much which pro or go saint you study? You can learn from them all.

I sympathize, but virtually all debates can be reduced to "what you're talking about isn't really important." And it isn't terribly unhealthy for most people, so long as it doesn't get heated or personal.

Mef wrote:Shusaku's memory seems to benefit from (suffer from?) a Buddy Holly-esque career, where due to a premature death no one is quite sure where he would peak. We have the benefit of seeing the young challenger rapidly rising, but have no aging master stage to really give him a thorough vetting, where he is the one the new generation is challenging. For a thought experiment -- What would we think of Lee ChangHo if something happened and his career was ended in the late 1990s? Or Cho Chikun in the Early 80's? We would only be left to speculate what heights they may be able to attain.

Interesting trying to determine what "greatness" is. I happen to be a fan of Buddy Holly, who was quite prolific for his unfortunately short career. Did he write the greatest songs ever? Of course, such a thing is subjective, but let's say he didn't. But his "greatness" is found in the many artists who have cited him as a significant influence: Bob Dylan, Elton John, Keith Richards, Bruce Springsteen, and even The Beatles.

Go is a bit more objective (people can actually win games), but it would be impossible to determine even assuming Shusaku had been born 100 years later. So if Buddy Holly would have been born in 1970, how great would he have been? To level the playing field, he would have to have access to the same influences as others have had...including Buddy Holly . So how great would Shusaku have been had he been born later, and been able to reflect on the teachings of Shusaku and Go Seigen?

Of course this whole exercise is impossible. My comment was only intended to reflect how go players view Shusaku, which I previously believed to be unquestionably among the greatest. But apparently I was wrong.

Balance wrote:But still, isn't the choice of those 80 games and their numbering something that is covered by the copyright of the book?
Are we sure that Exologist isn't a thief, or at least very immoral?
Is L19 perhaps in violation of the law simply by allowing the linking to the download?

So if I randomly numbered them and added a couple more games in there it would be moral?

Or I could remove the players and dates and just have strait SGFs where I could say it was only by pure chance that the 80 SGF files I made happened to be exactly the same as the ones in Invincible. (Unobjectionable story!)

Aren't the game records themselves public anyway?

Distributing the commentary in the book would surely infringe the intellectual property rights of the publisher. Or even keeping a specific kind of ordering the games (e.g. according to a subjective evaluation of the game quality) could (without being sure myself) cause an infringement. But putting the games in a random order, or an obvious chronological order would not infringe anything, as far as I know.

So, my opinion is that whether Exologist's download infringes the IP rights depends on whether the specific order of the games as in the book incorporates any intellectual effort (e.g. the writer's assessing the game quality and ordering accordingly).
This is my preliminary opinion without knowing the details of the corresponding IP law in force, but I believe it is in line with general guidelines in IP world.

I finally bought Invincible (in paperback), and I just wanted to add my belated thanks to exologist for putting together and pre-sorting the sgf files, which I downloaded a year ago and never looked at. Now that I have started reading it, I must say that the sgfs are an excellent supplement. BTW, I had the sgfs too, but I do appreciate that someone else has spent the time sorting them.

The site mentioned in the beginning of the thread is dead.
Does anyone have SGFs for "invincible" and is willing to share?

Thanks!

hulner wrote:Does anyone have SGFs for "invincible"?

Ask Google: Shusaku SGF. Today that finds e.g. https://homepages.cwi.nl/~aeb/go/games/games/Shusaku/