Boundary plays - O Meien's method
Posted: Tue Jan 25, 2011 7:13 am
Elsewhere here there has been a query on counting kos, and there has also been a little flurry of activity with book reviews. These two things prompted me to start this thread. It may well run into the sand, but if it doesn't it will probably prove valuable as a joint effort.
The background first. There are several ways to count boundary plays (yose). Except perhaps for those gifted with an affinity for numbers, the normal presentations range from awful to very, very awful. There are miai and deiri, terms for which a Japanese-English dictionary is little help (that's because they are technical accountancy terms). Miai has the extra problem of being associated with miai (nuff said!). When you use one and not the other, and why, is a mystery worthy of the tarot card aficionados. None of the presentations represent exactly what pros use - there are enigmas and variations, although deiri and miai will usually provide the basic beat. Mathematicians have their own take - CGT - which comes with an implicit elf'n'safety warning: don't try this at home. Some of us have ignored the warning and still bear the scars.
But every game of go has boundary plays, and so it is clearly a very, very important topic. So important that a pro will normally reckon to gain back about 40% of the value of handicap stones in this phase of the game. For us amateurs, a tiny improvement in your counting can save you five points a game instantly - half a stone! Kerchinggg! The only problem is, all this miai and deiri stuff gets in the way. Gedoingggg!
What to do? Well, O Meien has addressed the problem in a book called Boundary Plays - Absolute Counting. I thought we might look at this book in some detail, over a longish period, on the following basis.
1. I will present some ideas from the book, presented though in my own way. This will be in small dollops of honey for Pooh Bears like me of little mathematical brain, although when numbers are not around I will probably act more like Eeyore, perhaps a more suitable persona for someone with my L19 history.
2. Readers will attempt to understand what is written. Those who don't understand will query, and OTHER readers who have understood will answer. This is very important. I want to be Eeyorishly lazy, of course, but different ways of explaining things are rarely a bad thing.
3. There will be Tiggers among us - the bouncy, exuberant numbers people who understand it all instantly and upside down and who will be bursting to tell us why square pies are better than circles. I will have to ask them: please, please do come to the party but can you please remember Eeyore is listening, too. Above all, we want to limit this to O Meien's method.
4. If I judge we are staying on track and there is sufficient interest, I will move on to the next part. If we get to the end, what you will have obtained is a very useful, practical method for counting games and boundary plays that O himself claims to use. Even I understand parts of it, even if I sometimes have to take my socks off for the bigger numbers.
5. I will be excerpting the book. Those who wish to have many more examples and deeper explanations may wish to procure the original book and follow along that way. The book is:
ヨセ・絶対計算 by O Meien, Mainichi Communications (MyCom), 2004. About 1300 yen. ISBN 4-8399-1508-3.
Those interested in the subject enough to buy this book may also wish to order another one at the same time, to save on shipping. We may refer to it later on, but it is rather advanced and experimental, in that it is about miai and deiri counting but talks about them in a new theoretical way that shows how they relate to each other, but it also introduces new concepts to plug the gaps that these theories have. Despite that description, it is written in a clear and accessible way, with many examples to test yourself along the way. This book is:
目数小事典 (Compact Dictionary of Counting) by the Editorial Staff of the magazine Igo (always a great recommendation) and published by Seibundo Shinkosha, 2004. About 2000 yen. ISBN 4-416-70461-5. There is a companion volume to this but it adds nothing to the theory - it's just a workbook of problems.
The first excerpt has been put separately below for tidiness. I will go on to the next episode once I judge everyone has mastered the latest one (and wants to go on, of course - please let me know whenever it is time to stop).
The background first. There are several ways to count boundary plays (yose). Except perhaps for those gifted with an affinity for numbers, the normal presentations range from awful to very, very awful. There are miai and deiri, terms for which a Japanese-English dictionary is little help (that's because they are technical accountancy terms). Miai has the extra problem of being associated with miai (nuff said!). When you use one and not the other, and why, is a mystery worthy of the tarot card aficionados. None of the presentations represent exactly what pros use - there are enigmas and variations, although deiri and miai will usually provide the basic beat. Mathematicians have their own take - CGT - which comes with an implicit elf'n'safety warning: don't try this at home. Some of us have ignored the warning and still bear the scars.
But every game of go has boundary plays, and so it is clearly a very, very important topic. So important that a pro will normally reckon to gain back about 40% of the value of handicap stones in this phase of the game. For us amateurs, a tiny improvement in your counting can save you five points a game instantly - half a stone! Kerchinggg! The only problem is, all this miai and deiri stuff gets in the way. Gedoingggg!
What to do? Well, O Meien has addressed the problem in a book called Boundary Plays - Absolute Counting. I thought we might look at this book in some detail, over a longish period, on the following basis.
1. I will present some ideas from the book, presented though in my own way. This will be in small dollops of honey for Pooh Bears like me of little mathematical brain, although when numbers are not around I will probably act more like Eeyore, perhaps a more suitable persona for someone with my L19 history.
2. Readers will attempt to understand what is written. Those who don't understand will query, and OTHER readers who have understood will answer. This is very important. I want to be Eeyorishly lazy, of course, but different ways of explaining things are rarely a bad thing.
3. There will be Tiggers among us - the bouncy, exuberant numbers people who understand it all instantly and upside down and who will be bursting to tell us why square pies are better than circles. I will have to ask them: please, please do come to the party but can you please remember Eeyore is listening, too. Above all, we want to limit this to O Meien's method.
4. If I judge we are staying on track and there is sufficient interest, I will move on to the next part. If we get to the end, what you will have obtained is a very useful, practical method for counting games and boundary plays that O himself claims to use. Even I understand parts of it, even if I sometimes have to take my socks off for the bigger numbers.
5. I will be excerpting the book. Those who wish to have many more examples and deeper explanations may wish to procure the original book and follow along that way. The book is:
ヨセ・絶対計算 by O Meien, Mainichi Communications (MyCom), 2004. About 1300 yen. ISBN 4-8399-1508-3.
Those interested in the subject enough to buy this book may also wish to order another one at the same time, to save on shipping. We may refer to it later on, but it is rather advanced and experimental, in that it is about miai and deiri counting but talks about them in a new theoretical way that shows how they relate to each other, but it also introduces new concepts to plug the gaps that these theories have. Despite that description, it is written in a clear and accessible way, with many examples to test yourself along the way. This book is:
目数小事典 (Compact Dictionary of Counting) by the Editorial Staff of the magazine Igo (always a great recommendation) and published by Seibundo Shinkosha, 2004. About 2000 yen. ISBN 4-416-70461-5. There is a companion volume to this but it adds nothing to the theory - it's just a workbook of problems.
The first excerpt has been put separately below for tidiness. I will go on to the next episode once I judge everyone has mastered the latest one (and wants to go on, of course - please let me know whenever it is time to stop).
). 
without getting captured). Oh well, it's beside the point, but it caught my eye.