Johnny's Fantastic Japanese Historical Fiction Tale!

Read it here at WakeGaNai!

Hoshi wo Tsugumono: Muromachi Otogi Zoushi
It's in English by the way.

He wrote this awesome big thing for one of his courses. Enjoy~

Go Club

Hey~ Yukigami です！

I added a new section about Go.

Today I am still in the midst of post-revamp post editing. Not only am I editing all my previous posts to make them work with the new scheme, I'm doing a proper edit of the language and style, which includes toning down the fun-but-all-over-the-place-ness of some of them. Having written some of them pretty quickly or when I was pretty tired, I went a little overboard with bolding/underline/colour/text size/etc.

Well, by the time I even have a substantial number of readers, that stuff will have all been long since edited.
I might not finish today, but probably within a few days. It's not easy posting as much as I'd really like to (which is several posts every single day) while juggling all my courses and everything else in my life, but...
I'm doing my best!!
マジでがんばっている！

While I write this, I happen to be listening to my favourite Sword Art Online OP/ED, which is this:
Yume Sekai (夢世界)
On that note, I should mention that my friend over at WakeGaNai is a big fan of SAO, and like me, happens to be working hard on a fanfic or sorts (AU?). He's writing one based on SAO, whereas mine involves Pokemon.


Now, onto the main point of my post...


My school's Go club meets every Friday, and yesterday evening/night was the first meeting of 2014.
I brought up a lot of deep discussions about Go in order to collect the thoughts and opinions of my peers and use them to help me figure something out a little better. What I'm really interested in is all of the complicated elements involved in Go improvement. As I am a 5-6 Dan player (I teach, if any of you are interested), I am particularly interested in how it works for someone who has already gotten a strong and innate hold of the fundamentals. Two friends in particular joined me over dumplings in this discussion. One friend, a very high-level player who has attained American professional status (the American Go Association has just installed their own sort of professional system). More on the professional systems here.

He believes that it is purely about reading ability, and that style (for lack of a better word to describe the unique taste and tendencies and preferences in the way a person plays) and other internal factors have little to nothing to do with it. He also argued that getting stronger is not about playing stronger players or being taught, but rather, is based on personal study and solving a lot of life and death problems ("Tsumego"). Although the part about tsumego is a thing fully understood, appreciated, and applied by any player who has, largely by that very means, achieved my level or higher, and although it is the same advice that I give to my peers and my Go students and is a form of study I have utilized to the point that I am actually quite confident in my reading when playing against another player of even or lower level, I just cannot agree with that overly simplified answer. Moreover, it's not the kind of answer I was looking for - I was looking for a much deeper discussion. Still, my friends listened to my various proposals and questions and the logic and purpose behind them and did seem to acknowledge the depth of my ideas despite their simple answers. Here are some example subtopics discussed:

• Go improvement and affect of mental age
• Ability to reach 7-Dan if already aged 30+ or 35+
• How a built up style or bundle of built up tendencies and ways of thinking can promote or hinder improvement past a certain level
• Caps on personal potential
• Improving past 5/6 Dan: All about reading, or are concepts involved

This pro friend of mine later contradicted himself though; when the subject of playing environment/playing stronger players/being taught was brought up again, he advocated it as a great way to improve this time.

The other friend, a weaker Go player who is really great at music (and extremely enthusiastic about deep intellectual subject matter such as math and philosophy, a really interesting and receptive guy to talk to), was in full agreement with my other friend, and very strongly advocated the use of time and effort over stronger players and teachers. However, I think it's not quite that simple with Go, particularly once you have reached a level where you both know all the fundamentals well (and have lots of Go experience), and have little to no one strong to play with or learn from. Go is extremely complicated and ambiguous, so improving is not as clear-cut as it is with some other sports/hobbies/passions. One of them added, in response to the notion of a "personal potential cap", that there are two kinds of Go players: those whose mind is just not configured in the kind of way that yields them the prerequisites to having the affinity for Go to climb the Dan ranks or even the stronger Kyu ranks, and those who have it and have no limit to their potential and could without a doubt, by virtue of that "type 2" designation, reach professional strength. But my mind thinks about things in a complicated and deep way because I believe that everything about life and the universe is extremely convoluted. To me, it's hard to believe that it could be so black and white. I think there has to be a grey area. Even if the grey area exists only within a short range around the two polar extremes, I believe it must exist at least that much. For example, if two people are both that aforementioned "type 2" with great potential, since everyone's mind is very different and people are not made equally (I strongly believe this, and by this I really just mean that despite the many different kinds of intelligence there are, one person could still very well be "more intelligent", ie have a stronger mind, than another person, or that one person's mind is better at the faculties used for playing Go than another person's). If we assigned a number to the max potential of Person A, calling it "90", then I think even if Person is B fall within that "potentially strong Go player" sort of category, his potential might be 85 or 95 or maybe even 68.

Not to sound either conceited or condescending, but the fact that players as strong as my friend can be so strong and yet see the world through such a simplifying paradigm kind of cheers me up for some reason, because it makes me feel a little more like I should be able to reach that level, if and when I ever have the time and strong interest again to study Go seriously. (actually, it seems most of the people around me see everything a lot more simply. I guess that makes life easier?)

Well, another friend from the club who is about as strong as he is (these guys are among the very best in all of Canada!) approved of teaching me, so I will challenge him to more games from now on, since every time I played him before was really fruitful for me after his post-game (post-Armageddon) review. Because of this, the fact that most of my move criticisms on a game played later that night received his agreement, and other things, I pretty much came to the conclusion last night that the way I am thinking about the situation regarding my future Go improvement is correct. That is, due to my fair 5d+ reading level and vast experience since reaching "5-Dan" level a few years ago, I am probably correct in thinking that minimal study on my own time and merely playing and reviewing with him nearly every Friday (and reviewing a second time when I get home) is actually probably enough to help me make some big improvement. This is precisely the question I'd wanted answered when I begun to involve others in all those deep ideas at dinner. I would be very interested in studying Go improvement and strength from a research standpoint (sociologically, psychologically etc.).

And to support the conclusion I reached last night about my improvement, let me just further add that I improved relatively quickly after I began to play go in 2006, and I never hit any walls I couldn't break past all the way until I reached the relatively high level of 5-Dan. After high school, and after spending time writing, working, and doing what I wanted, I went to S. Korea and joined an international Go training facility by the name of "King's Baduk" in 2009. More on this in another post some time, but basically I returned to Canada as a 5-Dan player. After that, I spent around half a year training myself in Go, as I didn't have the money for lessons. I played lots and lots of games, solved problems, studied pro games, reviewed all of my games in-depth, but after all that time I didn't make any significant improvement. I entered university after that. I mention this anecdote because it supports my assertion that at this time, having much stronger players play and teach me is likely my best means of improving.

By the way, I plan to add over time a great deal of Go content, as well as information and stories about my own Go experiences. Eventually, the Go section will contain as much learning content (in addition to all other kinds of Go content) as would another website that focuses completely on helping site visitors with their Go improvement; while this is a mere blogspot page, I will probably never close it even if I get myself a real mad-from-scratch website going (the more traffic and networking the better, right?).

Stay tuned for all that! I'll also talk a lot more about the Go club, its members, Go in Toronto etc~!


Lastly,
let me just add...


First, snow and ice everywhere, severe power outages, and -37 weather,

and now, horrible downpours of rain flooding the streets and working together with the large, roadside snowbanks to form large and consistently-placed super-puddles!?

On my way home from post-Go club post-dinner late-night Go playing, I blocked off the rain with my hood and continuously and continuously dodged the giant puddles everywhere via the narrow bits of wet, icy sidewalk left on the far edges of the pavement tiles, but just when I was almost home, I activated someone's trap card and got owned. I stepped off the sidewalk to cross the street, onto the sheet of ice coating the first bit of road before me, only to realize I'd become the victim of a dreadful little optical illusion...
The "sheet of ice" turned out to be a giant, shin-deep, freezing cold ocean of a puddle that happened to be very reflective under the street lamp, and somewhat ice-tinted.

Well, good thing it's not really in my personality to get emo about something like that~  :)


~Yukigami

Introduction to Go / 圍棋 Wéiqí / 바둑 Baduk / 囲碁 Igo

Yukigami here~


So reader, do you know what the game called "Go" is?
You can also read about it here at Sensei's Library.

Go is an immensely fascinating, deep, competitive, and mentally cultivating board game that originated in China some ~4,000 years ago. The game embodies the people playing - particularly higher level players who've mastered the basics and become able to play well - and the players' emotions, personalities, and in-game ambitions are manifested - and visible to some - in each of their moves. Although man-made, many have considered Go to be ominously deep, simply flawless, and analogous to life despite having very few rules and being played on nothing but a 19 x 19 grid, by taking turns placing black or white stones on the intersections rather than in between them (so, not on the squares.)

Many players such as myself actually got into Go as a result of having watched the Anime Hikaru no Go!

The game is about surrounding territory (area of the board), and the two players take turns placing one stone at a time on intersections of the board. Go can be played online, too, on servers such as KGS or Tygem.  Each intersection of the board is worth one point, and the player with the most points(territory) by the end wins (unless they win by resignation, of course).

Counting takes place after both players have passed their turns due to inability to find any remaining moves on the board worth any points for them (I will make a video of it sometime). Stones themselves on the board are not worth points, unless they've been captured or the players are using the Chinese counting style (we'll talk about that much later on another occasion).

Each single stone placed on an intersection without any other stones next to it to the north, east, south, or west of it has four "liberties"; the empty intersections north, east, south and west of it, not including diagonal directions, are its "life" - in Mandarin Chinese we would call this "chi". What happens when the last liberty is gone is that the group is immediately taken off the board and added to the prisoners/captures (however you wish to call them) of the unfriendly(capturer's) colour. Captured stones are stored in the lid of an open Go stone bowl/container, or otherwise off the board and away from the bowls of stones, and kept for later.

Every stone on the board is referred to in terms of "groups"; any one or more stones of the same colour are considered all one "group" as long as they are all connected by their liberties - that means that a string or cluster of stones diagonally next to it counts as a separate group. I won't explain the Chinese counting style now since it's complicated to explain and very unnecessary, but the usual style of counting - the Japanese style - is done by having both players pass their turns and agree to score the game, remove all stones recognized on the board as "dead" that were not removed as captures during the game due to having died without ever running out of liberties (there are fundamental rules and concepts for recognizing dead groups).

In other words, stones that end up in a hopeless situation and cannot escape the fate of a death-by-liberty-shortage that the opposing player could manually initiate at any time during the game are, as a rule, considered "dead already", and the player whose territories contain the opposite-coloured dead stones is not required to spend moves to shorten the liberties of the stranded stones until the liberties reach zero. It is a common mistake by weak players to go out of their way to capture all the already-dead groups of the opposing colour needlessly, even though the process of placing stones inside their own territory fills up their own surrounded intersections, thereby losing them one point per move.

After removing all of the dead stones from the board and adding them to the opposing player's captures, neutral spots, or dame ("dah-may" - intersections that lye in between opposite-coloured territories that are impossible to fully encircle and thereby claim as points, due to lack of room) are played either optionally, or to prevent confusion, or to claim more real points if for some reason the players are counting with the reversed-logic Chinese method (which in such case, should definitely all by played on *before* passing the turn). In the west we generally refer to them as "dame" or "neutral points". I would greatly suggest beginners to fill in all the neutral points before scoring in order to make the respective territories very clear.

After pulling captured stones off the board, each player takes all the stones they've captured and places them onto intersections inside any of the territories of corresponding colour. By this logic, the more of a player's stones have been captured, the more points they will lose out on later. One capture becomes equivalent to one surrounded intersection of territory. The difference is that surrounding an intersection gains you one point, whereas capturing a stone causes your opponent to lose one point during scoring. Thus, the two are equivalent.

However, it is usually much, much easier to surround area on the board than to capture many stones; although weak players constantly have their stones captured by others, such is usually not the case in high-level games. Most of the small amount of stone capturing that goes on in high level games is a side effect of or effective sacrifice for the purpose of surrounding territory, invading territory, fighting to make a group fully alive etc.

If, for example, the Black player still has White captures left to fill up White territory with even though he has already reduced all of White's territory to zero with White captured stones, the way to deal with this situation is through the basic logic of points in the game: since gaining a point for oneself or taking away a point from the opponent is equivalent towards winning the game, since winning requires just 0.5 points more than the opponent as its minimum requirement, the player who is unable to use the rest of his captured stones counts them up; if there are still ten more White captures yet unplaced, for example, then Black can instead increase his own territory by ten points, by removing ten of his own Black stones from his territories, thus increasing his total territory by ten while not putting the opponent into negative numbers of territory. Also, players cannot run out of stones; usually a Go set has something like 200+ stones per side, and it's extremely unlikely and pretty near impossible that more would be needed.

Because Black has the significant advantage of playing first (though this is generally only significant for advanced players, so don't even bother blaming a loss on that!), White receives a bonus of 6.5 points called "Komi" (from Japanese) which is added to his or her total score at the end of scoring. Komi is where the ".5" comes from in the score of Go games, a fractional difference received by white in order to prevent tied games. Thus, if Black has 76 points on the board and white has 70 on the board, then if it's an even game (no handicap), White wins because 70 + Komi (6.5) = 76.5, thus White has 0.5 points more than Black.

A Komi of 0.5, which merely causes White to win in case of a draw, is referred to as a 1-stone handicap. In other words, reducing White's Komi to a mere tie-breaker is a measure taken to compensate for a 1-rank difference ("a stone's difference"). Below, I will briefly detail the rating system. For player-player rank differences of more than one, stones are set onto the "star points" of the board (starting with corners, following a certain arrangement for each configuration). Even though black starts off with extra stones on the board, White's Komi is also reduced to 0.5 in all these arrangements.

A handicap of two entails placing a black stone on two corner star points lying diagonally across from each other on he board. Specifically, Black traditionally places them in the corners in the upper right and lower left from his or her point of view.

A 3-stone handicap has a stone on each corner star point except for the one in the upper left, which is used for the 4th handicap stone.

In a 5-stone game, there is a stone placed on the star point in the very center of the board in addition to the four corners.

For 6-stone handicaps, however, the handicap stones are arranged in favour of symmetry by placing a stone in each corner, and a stone on each of the east- and west-side side star points.

7-stone games, like all of the other configurations, maintain symmetry (except for one- and three-stone handicap setups, that is). Compared to a 6-stone game, a 7-stone game also has a stone placed in the center (the star point in the center is called "Tengen").

8-stone games have a handicap stone on all star points other than the central one, and 9-stones games have handicap stones on every single star point.

While Go in terms of rules and objective is very simple, the game is at the same time extremely complex - so much so that even professional players cannot say that they have, or can ever, "master" the game. Thousands of people have dedicated their entire lives to Go, and serious students of the game spend extreme hours on their endless learning. They play lots of games with each other and with stronger players or teachers, replay and study pro games, mentally solve puzzles which require reading many moves and variations far ahead in their heads, and study all about each of many other aspects of the game such as opening development patterns, local corner-of-the-board patterns that get really complicated and intensely numerous ("Joseki"), middlegame ideas, in-game counting and positional judgement, endgame tactics and concepts, and for lack of better translation, effective moves of skillful finesse ("Tesuji" in Japanese). But the list goes on...

Go cultivates various faculties of the mind and draws from them all to contribute towards the most efficient and effective tactics, the deepest and most accurate and logical strategies, and an overall display of logic, reasoning, flexibility, greed control/reasonability, choice making, risk management, self discipline, move reading, and of course multitasking (and more..).

Because the game tests player on this kind of wisdom and discipline and helps them improve upon these aspects of self, and for many other reasons overall, Go is an extremely deep and philosophical game with nothing to be desired in terms of large-scale strategy, small-scale tactics, mental cultivation, challenge (there is no end~), and fun!
(...and taste~  ;p)

Go is an absolutely brilliant game, and it is hard to believe that it was created by humans (in fact, we don't even know by whom!). Although at first, someone learning the elementary. fundamental tactics of Go may not yet have the privilege of seeing the true depth and awesomeness and wonder of Go to its true and unending extent, the more they learn the more they'll see it, the more they'll see how much they're not seeing, and the more they will be amazed.

At the same time though, there is quite a lot of exclusive fun to be had via the process of learning and continually improving at the game, and of being at a level where Go is a complete mystery and a maze yet to become an innate kind of second-nature developed skill. In saying this, I imply that reaching that kind of innate feeling does happen (somewhat, anyway), it's just that despite that new feeling, and despite the ability to play relatively good moves repeatedly over and over in only a few seconds each if we want to, we despite development of this ability lose none of the room for self improvement or challenge in the game that we've ever had. Even though we can quickly play mostly-good moves - or at least decent moves - playing faster does usually reduce the quality of our moves.

Like the expanding universe, the Go world around us and all its challenges expands proportionately with us as we improve - or rather, it expands even faster than does our knowledge of Go.
"True knowledge is knowing that you know nothing."


Go is an assimilated part of me and will never escape me, for once it entered my life, it for a time was as my life itself - and by its own virtues, still is.


~Yukigami