Life In 19x19

Take the gorating top 50 and female(near) top 50 for a total of 100 leading pros.

Taiwan has 1.5
Japan has 8.5
Korea has 29 (South Korea)
China has 61

If you divide each number by their population in billions to get their top 100 per billion, you get approximately 65, 71, 580, and 47 respectively. Of course this doesn't take into account age demographics but all of them are similarly relatively aging populations, I think.

Now, I must add, that if one population has ten times more people, in addition to expecting one player from the smaller population for every ten from the larger population in a list from the highest-rated, you would expect the number one from the smaller population to be on the bottom of the top 10 of larger population, because they play less games among high-level players to train against in official matches. Therefore the top Japanese player would be about 11th or 12th among Chinese pros, and I'd expect the same pattern to repeat itself with the second and third top player from the smaller population, and so on, simply due to there being less competition. This especially applies in the case of Iyam Yuuta, who for some time couldn't play in many international tournaments.

Beijing-controlled China is the weakest nation at 47. Taipei-controlled China is slightly stronger still at 65, and at 85, Japan is stronger than that by a similar ratio. This implies Japan's Go scene has been stronger than both Beijing and Taipei controlled China for the last 12 to 24 years, the length of one generation. But Korea, of course, is significantly stronger, 12 times stronger than Beijing-controlled China, 9 times stronger than Taipei-controlled China, and 7 times stronger than Japan. So do what the Nakamura's did and train in Korea.

But what if goratings inflates the strength of Japanese Players? So try mamumamu instead! You may say. Okay.

So in the next post, I'll use the combined average between goratings and mamumamu, and in a new system where the weighting of each player is according to their position. So having a player at #1 gives a country 5 more points than a player at #5, which in turn gives them twice as many points as a player at #10, and so on . . .

Kind of a fun idea but the system is flawed, or at least dividing by population to come to these numbers is not insightful for me given the vast discrepancy in population and living between China and Taiwan, Japan, and Korea.

It can be interesting to look at statistics. It is less interesting to try to draw far reaching conclusions because it is difficult to support those with statistics.

That said, more statistics is always fun. Please post more!

But playing a board game (or not) is not equal between populations. In cultures where almost everybody learns/plays the game those that are really good at it will be discovered. However in a population where only a small percentage are even exposed to the game, not so. Only a small percentage of people in the US have even heard about go/weiqi let alone played it.

Thus you would expect top chess players from Georgia or Azerbaijan out of proportion to their populations (a chess set was a traditional part of a Georgian bride's dowry)

1) Doesn't Japan have a disproportionately high number of strong pros who are actually from other countries (like Taiwan)? I'm not saying they shouldn't count, but it is worth noting.

2) I met a go player who became 1p in China as a teen, but then stopped playing to go to college. Anyway, he told me that there are many many many amateurs in China who are pro level. There just isn't room for most of them to live and function as pros because of the way their system is structured, so they do something else career-wise. So to say that "Japan's Go scene has been stronger than both Beijing and Taipei controlled China" just seems flat out wrong.

mhlepore wrote:1) Doesn't Japan have a disproportionately high number of strong pros who are actually from other countries (like Taiwan)? I'm not saying they shouldn't count, but it is worth noting.

It seems unwarranted to say it is "a disproportionately high number". I am not sure what you actually mean by that. To me it seems great that the Japanese have taken on many students from around the world through the years. They have contributed a lot to the development of the game by teaching and training.

This looks like history writings of those countries"if you just use the categories that we propose and ignore all the surrounding facts, we are great and the other are just nothing".

kvasir wrote: It seems unwarranted to say it is "a disproportionately high number". I am not sure what you actually mean by that. To me it seems great that the Japanese have taken on many students from around the world through the years. They have contributed a lot to the development of the game by teaching and training.

So you don't know what my comments mean, but you nonetheless call them unwarranted? This should be fun.

I have no issue with Japan taking in international students at a rate higher than Korea/China. In fact, I am happy they do it. But the original poster says "...This implies Japan's Go scene has been stronger than (China)", and I wonder just how strong their domestic scene actually is if they are going to other countries to pluck their young talent away.

My issue is not with Japan - it is with the OP's claims.

I don't think that Japan is "plucking away" other countries' young players. I am not au courant regarding the training of young players but in the past players such as Go Seigen(China), Cho Chikun(S. Korea), Rin Kaiho(Taiwan) and many others, went to Japan because the opportunities for high level training in their home countries were not easily available in their home countries, or they had some connection with Japan. In more recent times in Korea it was very difficult to enter and graduate from official pro training. In China there were governmental restrictions making it difficult to enter training.

mhlepore wrote:[...]I wonder just how strong their domestic scene actually is if they are going to other countries to pluck their young talent away.

Brain drain doesn't usually imply people migrating to countries with weaker ecosystems than their own. I'll grant that the professionalization quotas mess the image, but still...

Take care.

mhlepore wrote: So you don't know what my comments mean, but you nonetheless call them unwarranted? This should be fun.

I didn't call your "comments" unwarranted, only your claim that there was a "disproportionately high number" of non-Japanese Go players in Japan. Seeing your explanation one might get the impression that you think most strong Japanese Go players are not Japanese and should be counted separately. Is this the issue you are having with the OP's statistics? Can we expect statistics from yourself?

kvasir wrote: I didn't call your "comments" unwarranted, only your claim that there was a "disproportionately high number" of non-Japanese Go players in Japan.

You are misquoting me. I said there are a disproportionate number of *strong pros* in Japan that are from other countries. Which is what the original poster is asking about. And disproportionate doesn't mean "most" - it means out of proportion compared to the rates seen in the other two countries (China and Korea). And disproportionate in and of itself is not a pejorative.

kvasir wrote: Seeing your explanation one might get the impression that you think most strong Japanese Go players are not Japanese and should be counted separately. Is this the issue you are having with the OP's statistics? Can we expect statistics from yourself?

No, I don't have numbers to present. But I will say that there seems to be a pipeline where certain talented foreign youth (especially from Taiwan) are able to go to Japan and then go on to become superstars.

To the extent that those individuals are factoring into the original poster's numbers, I think it is worth pointing that out. Not because it discredits go in Japan, but because (in my opinion) it discredits the original poster's argument.

This is all caused by a mistake on my part Also it's hard to get emotional nuance across over text on the internet (one person was talking mainly about the validity of statistics whereas another interpreted that as talking about cultural significance mainly; the significances were inversed, haha .

I took into account only one pro that moved from Taiwan to Japan but forgot the other two. This makes a huge difference to the Taiwanese Statistics of course:

Southside Korea: 29/0.051 ~= 568.5

Taipei-controlled China: 2.5/0.0238888 ~= 104.5

Japan: 7.5/0.1258 ~= 59.5

Beijing-controlled China: 61/1.4488 ~= 42

So Taipei-controlled China is significantly stronger than Japan after all. But if anything, Taipei-controlled China is more likely to play with Japan in international tournaments than with Beijing-controlled China.

The reason why I count a pro that was born in one country but became pro in another as half for both is because the initial interest in go and them getting near pro-level was in Taipei-controlled China but them becoming a top-50 pro was done in the Japanese high-level scene. And for the in-between stage of them reaching near insei to pro level, likely both scenes were equally involved.

And of course they're going to be lots of amateurs stronger than most pros in China; there are lots of people! Haha if even in a country that populous the training of all those people who try to become pro is in one headquarters, they'll leave having seen every other pro-level amateur in Bejing-controlled China and maybe Taipei-controlled China if we're talking about the pro exam.

I don't like comparisons like "country X is stronger that country Y", it may trigger unpleasant nationalistic discussions (even though this is not the case so far).

In addition, counting top 50 males + top 50 females may not be an accurate measure of strength, since there are more male than female pros. If for instance 80% of pros are male, then it would more accurate to count top 80 males and top 20 females.

jlt wrote:I don't like comparisons like "country X is stronger that country Y", it may trigger unpleasant nationalistic discussions (even though this is not the case so far). . .

Well, it would be really bad taste considering the recent crisis caused by nationalistic sentiments, and I think the average level of intelligence on L19 is higher than your random internet lounge-place, as one would hope. The entire point is that we can learn from Korea and Taiwan!

jlt wrote: . . . In addition, counting top 50 males + top 50 females may not be an accurate measure of strength, since there are more male than female pros. If for instance 80% of pros are male, then it would more accurate to count top 80 males and top 20 females.

I agree! Yet at the same time I'm treating a top female pro as directly equivalent in the count because in my view when I'm referring to the strength of the country I'm referring to both the actual top-level strength but also the female top-level strength, because it shows that that strength is consistent.

And even if one doesn't take that view, even if a country has less top pros but more female pros by significantly more than that amount, that country will have more top pros in the future for sure. Any country with a healthier gender ratio in any mindsport is going to end up much stronger in the near future, so if we want an estimate most relevant to now and not just the last generation, the female top 50 is more important to me than even the youth top 50.