Life In 19x19

It is interesting to me how the development and styles of go players is shaped by the availability of go books on the marketplace.

Hm, not sure I agree with that. In my experience most "theory" go books (here I mean everything except problem-books) are aimed at ddk-sdk players.

In my opinion, the only way to get better is by actually playing: so games and tsumego. "Go theory" usually looks to me as a gimmick for pros (or other authors) to make money off of weak players by instilling hopes that somehow learning "go theory" will cut down significantly on the work required to get stronger.

It's kind of like the P vs NP problem. Basically becoming strong at go is NP, that is: there is only the hard road via lots of problem solving and playing games.

"Go theory" books would like to suggest that there is that magic shortcut to becoming stronger, which would correspond to saying that becoming strong at go is P and the polynomial time algorithm is learning go theory.

Btw, that P vs NP analogy is not as far off as one might think, as I'm pretty sure solving tsumego is NP, however one would like to define this statement precisely.



edit: I apologize for the handwaving P vs NP analogy, I'm obviously no expert in that field. However I think there is a valid point in there, somewhere.

leichtloeslich wrote:Btw, that P vs NP analogy is not as far off as one might think, as I'm pretty sure solving tsumego is NP, however one would like to define this statement precisely.

Life and death is probably not in NP. It is at least PSPACE-hard.

hyperpape wrote:The only question is whether because S&S originally printed the books, they have some special obligation to think of the matter in a different way.

So:

• I'm too lazy to read back and see who said or thought what, but if you're questioning their motives, then stop. That's dumb.
• I don't know what I think, something about the offer gave me a funny feeling. Yet it really is quite a bold claim that S&S must ignore that very ordinary rationale stated above.
  
  If you criticize, you're holding them to some very strict standard about how they see their role as a hobby/business. Do you really have good reason to think that not only is there an alternate way to see the situation, but that they are blameworthy for not having seen it?

Yeah, that's a good point. I don't question their motives, I own too many nicely priced books from them on Smart Go Books to view them as profit hungry capitalists screwing over go players, that would be absurd. My objection is a completely subjective one, I don't like seeing, in a market really lacking in books on attacking at kyu level, someone connected to the hobby increasing the price into "premium" territory for a go book, even if I can understand the logic behind doing so. There is only one alternative that I'm aware of at that level and the two aren't equivalent from what I understand and would be quite complimentary I understand. I don't think analysis this as a book in isolation rather than its place in the market makes sense. But, whatever.


There also is a world of difference between "I don't agree with that price" and "They shouldn't have priced that way."

Life and death is probably not in NP.

What would be your rationale here?

Without using any technical definition or invoking complexity theory, what I meant was that for solving tsumego there is basically no real alternative to brute force.

Note that heuristics like "capturing 3 in a row is one eye" are equivalent to pruning the search tree at a certain node since we have already searched the tree beyond that point many times. It's like caching certain parts of the tree; point being: it's still brute force.

I take it you claim there is a fundamentally different way to solve tsumego, other than brute force?

Speaking informally, there is a hierarchy of difficulty for problems in complexity theory. NP problems are generally speaking "too hard" to solve, but there are still harder problems, which are not in NP. He is saying that tsumego are one such problem.

If you want to be technically correct, you can say that tsumego are NP-hard.

leichtloeslich wrote:
I take it you claim there is a fundamentally different way to solve tsumego, other than brute force?

I'm claiming that tsumego are fundamentally harder than NP, since setups involving L&D of a big group are a common way to set up hardness proofs about go, and since eg. reading ladders is PSPACE-complete, and most people believe NP < PSPACE.

For example, ladders are PSACE-complete: http://homepages.cwi.nl/~tromp/lad.ps
Go is PSPACE-hard: http://www.levreyzin.com/presentations/Go.pdf

Go in general with Japanese rules is EXPTIME-complete, but I don't know if that result depends on evaluating potential nonlocal ko threats, in which case one could argue that is outside the scope of tsumego, which is why I'm only sure about PSPACE-hardness.

I just got an email from S&S and it was a box of 30 copies and they only have 3 copies left at this moment. Will be gone in a jiffy.

tchan001 wrote:I just got an email from S&S and it was a box of 30 copies and they only have 3 copies left at this moment. Will be gone in a jiffy.

Yes, and ten of ’em are on their way to Germany, one of ’em is for me <happy dance> my heirs will be happy: these test prints are almost as rare as the red and blue Mauritius “Post Office” stamps

Bonobo, take a picture of the cover and post it for us here when you get it. So we have a picture of this rare book on L19

Moral of the story: When in doubt, mind your own business.

Here are pictures of the cover and title page.

Cover


Title Page

Hello,

I don't get why Slate & Shell don't make pdf sales, if they're not willing to reprint ? They can borrow a scanner and make a living from licence fees selling bits.

Smartgo is a good idea, but looks like their soft is both very limited (no desktop or android version, Windows is crap anyway) and the no pdf export function reminds me of the attempts of CD and DVD copyrighters who didn't get that far. Considering go as quite a limited market is the only thing that keep their library from pirates.

[admin] reference to pirated copies removed -JB [/admin]

Thanks

AleXi3l wrote:I don't get why Slate & Shell don't make pdf sales, if they're not willing to reprint ? They can borrow a scanner and make a living from licence fees selling bits.

Smartgo is a good idea, but looks like their soft is both very limited (no desktop or android version, Windows is crap anyway) and the no pdf export function reminds me of the attempts of CD and DVD copyrighters who didn't get that far. Considering go as quite a limited market is the only thing that keep their library from pirates.

Just a few points:
- PDF doesn’t take advantage of the electronic medium, and is a poor replacement for a printed book. On the other hand, Go Books by SmartGo lets you resize text, replay diagrams, and copy diagrams as SGF, for instance.
- Kiseido is offering some books as PDF (http://www.kiseidodigital.com/kdb.html); they’re offering many more books through Go Books.
- Mac version of Go Books is in early beta; Android version is planned. More info at http://gobooks.com/platforms.html. (You can follow @gobooks on Twitter for future announcements.)

Hello,
thanks for your answer.

I already answered your first point by stating that "Smartgo is a good idea" in my previous post.

To your second point, Kiseido's pdf offer is limited to 4 books (and go world archives) and I was talking about Slate & Shell. The fact is ebooks format is a mess actually, and even though pdf "is a poor replacement for a printed book" (which I find dubious, owning myself quite a lot of pdf ebooks I bought, I never had an issue reading them, but I agree, I prefer PostScript) I still find it a better alternative to "yep we sell stuff that you can only read from within OUR software" (I'm not targeting you, I find Amazon, Apple & the likes approches even worse either).

About the third one, isn't the Mac version a beta for like a year for about the SAME code ? About Android, I planned a lot of stuff too that I never did, but that's just me, I hope you will achieve it eventually.

Best regards

smartgo wrote:Just a few points:
- PDF doesn’t take advantage of the electronic medium, and is a poor replacement for a printed book. On the other hand, Go Books by SmartGo lets you resize text, replay diagrams, and copy diagrams as SGF, for instance.
- Kiseido is offering some books as PDF (http://www.kiseidodigital.com/kdb.html); they’re offering many more books through Go Books.
- Mac version of Go Books is in early beta; Android version is planned. More info at http://gobooks.com/platforms.html. (You can follow @gobooks on Twitter for future announcements.)

Kiseido uses ClickandBuy for pdf sales. (Why not Mastercard/Visa or Paypal?) After authorizing payment through my bank, which ClickandBuy confirmed by email, I never received the so-called test charge from the company. (This is reminiscent of descriptions of how off-shore poker sites operate.) Do not just take my word at face value. Do a Google search for "clickandbuy scam." Or start with this "F" rating from the U.S. Better Business Bureau: http://www.bbb.org/new-york-city/busine ... -ny-94189/

I, for one, would love to purchase Go Books for Android devices! (Just not through ClickandBuy!) Are differences among various manufacturer's hardware/OS a problem or is it more to do with concerns over piracy?