Life In 19x19

The trick is that go terms used in English neither mean what the terms mean in a (non-go) dictionary, nor are they purely stipulative terms, explicitly and precisely defined without any prior usage in the way that a term like n-connected would be.

For that reason, you can't just say "efficiency" means what I say it means. You have to be cognizant of how people actually use the term. You can try to get them to think of it in a better way, but that has to be connected to how they actually already think of it.

topazg wrote:

Joaz Banbeck wrote:Many beginners have this problem. They play moves that are sente, but which are aji keshi.

FWIW, so do dan players. I'm not sure when this particular habit is supposed to disappear

Reading Lee Sedol's commented games book last night, and he had a hard time deciding if he made a necessary sente play or aji keshi...

So I'm guessing never.

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

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Sente forcing or aji keshi?:)

RobertJasiek wrote:

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Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$B
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Sente forcing or aji keshi?:)

joseki

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"An amateur would think of as unimaginative and inefficient. Those who are forever trying to play efficiently place their stones as far apart as they can. That is one reason they miss so many key points." -- Kageyama, "Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go"

When go terms are used, then usually they have meanings DIFFERENT from common lanuage English words, regardless of which meanings common English words might have. E.g., "stone" as a go term has a meaning different (more specific) from what is understood in common language. A common language stone can have various shapes and functions. A go term stone always is a playing device, and all go stones (of a game set) look alike.

Not really. In CJK singular and plural are rarely distinguished, so 'stone' can be, and very often is, 'stones' which is further used as the standard word for 'group', as in the famous 'large groups never die' proverb (大石死せず). Not understanding this has led some people to malign Oriental rules unfairly - but let's not go there: the point is again simply that not everything about language is, er, black and white.

Sente forcing or aji keshi?:)

Both these terms are misused here, I suggest. You can't erase aji unless there is aji in the first place. In normal Japanese usage there is no aji here. There is a scale of something like, te ga aru (there is a move here), aji (aftertaste), aya (complications), and fukumi (a hint of something, or something implicit). Aji is normally limited to the situation when several plays have been made and there is something there but it can only be activated by help from outside. If there is a play there that needs no outside help. you say te ga aru. Into this mix you could add nerai (target) but that tends to be limited to fuseki or higher strategy. The other words relate to tactics or lower strategy and the middle-game.

The significance of nerai extends to sente. Too many weaker players judge a sequence by whether they end in sente and mean by that that they end up with it being their turn to move. Sente in the strategic sense of initiative (which is much commoner in Chinese for some reason) means having the move AND having targets. Just having the move simply puts you in the rather neutral position of Black having first move on an empty board in an even game. If you understand this, you begin to understand honte and thick play - they leave no targets and so giving up the right to move next to the other side may be no big deal. In Robert's example above, 'sente forcing' is, I assume, a rendering of 'sente kikashi', but this phrase in my experience is an awkward invention in Japanese to try to differentiate between sente meaning simply sente (having the move) and sente meaning initiative (i.e. having the move AND targets). Therefore, asking if the move shown in the example is 'sente forcing' is meaningless unless you show where the target is, somewhere else on the board. The target is clearly not White's 3-3 stone. As MagicWand says, that is just the opposite side's stone in a joseki.

Just to expand on something that's already implicit in what John wrote above...

One thing that often seems to be overlooked in discussions of sente and gote is that playing gote can lead to sente (and vice versa).

Sometimes people talk about these topics as if sente is a synonym for 'good' and gote is a synonym for 'bad', but you have to play the move that's required by the position.

One gote move (defending) at the right time and place can deny the opponent 10 sente moves. Therefore, playing gote yourself can lead to gote for the opponent.

Likewise, a gote move can lead to future sente moves when it makes your overall position thick - either in terms of making some stones solid and difficult to attack, or in completing outward facing influence. This can lead to sente because it lets you attack or apply pressure in ways that might've been unreasonable, or less effective before.

As John said, what's it's really about is holding the initiative, or having an active position. If you don't take gote when you should, you can easily fall into a passive position, where you let your opponent dictate how the game develops. Strong players will often engineer some sort of trade, even at the expense of quite a lot of points, to avoid falling into a passive game. This, by the way, is also why stones should be sacrificed before they become heavy, when possible.

A passive position lets your opponent coerce you into playing inefficiently (on a global scale).

P.S. Robert, I'm not the one trying to define efficiency and haengma to be the same thing. From my perspective it sounds like that's what you're doing, though I know that that's not your intention. And while 'haengma' seems to be so broadly used that the only concise (though somewhat unsatisfactory) translation seems to be something like 'development' or even just 'move', your definition, "the optimal compromise between safety and speed of local movement," reads like an attempt to explain haengma to me.

John Fairbairn wrote:In normal Japanese usage there is no aji here.

Surely it depends on which meaning one assigns to the word. Anyway, I have used :) and thought that it would clarify it to be a joke.

'sente kikashi', but this phrase in my experience is an awkward invention in Japanese to try to differentiate between sente meaning simply sente (having the move) and sente meaning initiative (i.e. having the move AND targets).

No. The phrase sente kikashi simply stresses that the player starting a kikashi is the next to move after its execution (incl. the opponent's reply).

unless you show where the target is, somewhere else on the board.

The "target" is the created global black sphere of influence, in which next Black can play to develop it.

gogameguru wrote:I'm not the one trying to define efficiency and haengma to be the same thing.

Which other consequence do you envision by doubting "local" in the definition of efficiency?

'haengma' seems to be so broadly used that the only concise (though somewhat unsatisfactory) translation seems to be something like 'development' or even just 'move',

Yes, translations are unsatisfactory. Therefore I asked Korean professionals, see old rec.games.go articles.

your definition, "the optimal compromise between safety and speed of local movement," reads like an attempt to explain haengma to me.

My definition of haengma starts:

"the local to global relation and development of all stones"

and continues to work out its

"major aspects for a player's stones [...]
* Good balance between safety and thickness of connection and extension versus efficiency in speed of movement.
* This applies to all scales of development from local to global coordination.
* Good use of potential in the development directions.

The presence of opposing stones affect how efficiently and well the player's stones can work together."

(Joseki 2 Strategy, p. 146.)

Note that a) this refers to efficiency and b) refers to local to global and not just to local. A balance like in my efficiency definition occurs also in my haengma definition, which alread hints at good use, but only in a specialised form (not in the all-inclusive form, as I understand it now). But you can, from the definitions, see the drafted order

efficiency < haengma < best use

with increasing scales.

RobertJasiek wrote:

$$B
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Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$B
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Sente forcing or aji keshi?:)

Reminds me of that commercial where they show the machinery in a diner, then a waitress has a milk shake and says, "You can't taste efficiency."

If we constantly try to brainthink new explanowords for the existing allocation of mouthwords from several different geographic regions, we're soon confoundified because existing mouthwords are already 90% cephoutilised. This results in linguoculturalkamf. The guilty lemma lies in thinking that the viscosity of existing language is 0, which leads us to falsely conclude that mouthwords are infinitely bendable. In practice, the bendability of mouthwords is severely curtailed by existing preconceptual inertia, and the fierce resistance of the current tenants, to the retro-occupation, means that nobody can understand what you're trying to say.

Much better to employ a blue ocean strategy and synthogenify new mouthwords for greenfield exploitation. Here are some examples for consideration that don't suffer from coterminous utilisation:

- Morbolithic
- Lignopansphere
- Cosmochronoutility

With this kind of approach, we will surely solve all existing communication problems.

Language should be used to simplify, rather than complicate, after all.

(yes, this is an attempt at humour, but my point is serious )

I don't like your mouthwords. They scare me.

David, it's worth distinguishing between bad style (using greenfield to refer to words rather than to locations) and infelicities (cephoutilize and linguoculturakampf will be jarring to people who know both roots, and useless to anyone else) and fresh, striking ideas like "mouthwords" - which both amuse and help to analyze.

The way I see it, the go literature in CJK is often not strictly precise in its use of go terms. I don't think that this is necessarily a bad thing. This style of writing is often more fluid and less stilted.

Just as an example, I have read a book by Cho Hunhyun that uses the term bori-sunsoo (보리선수) in a way that is different from how lovelove has defined it. From what I can see, the CJK writers will often use a go term if it serves to spark enough mental connections in the reader's mind as to why a move is good or bad. This style has its downsides as well, but I am happy enough with this style that I keep on buying many go books with my disposable income.

I think there is a tendency in the Western go world to take the CJK writings on go too seriously and have pedantic (and perhaps even a bit snooty?) discussions about what certain terms mean when the CJK writers themselves are quite flexible in their use of those terms. It may even be the case that a writer's own style of play affects how he interprets and employs certain terms.

I would suggest that the English-speaking world come up with its own precisely defined set of go terms rather than tackle the impossible task of giving precise definitions to CJK go terms that will be consistent with their varied usages in the entirety of the CJK go literature.

...that or just stop arguing about the meaning of CJK go terms.

lemmata wrote:The way I see it, the go literature in CJK is often not strictly precise in its use of go terms. I don't think that this is necessarily a bad thing. This style of writing is often more fluid and less stilted.

I don't think it is a question of style, as much as the fact that go terms in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have been around so long that they have acquired the normal ambiguity of regular language. It is a mistake to assume that a go term has a single, precise meaning.