AMERICAN GO E-JOURNAL: News from the American Go Association August 20, 2001 In This Edition: - CALENDAR OF EVENTS: Latest listings! - SCOREBOARD: Northern Virginia - GO NEWS: Korea Sweeps World Youth Goe Championship; Japanese Consulate General Offers Help to Midwest Go Community; Memorize 100 Pro Games and Call Me In the Morning. - Go Review: Gogod Database - ONLINE GO: Igowin - Your First Go Tutor - AGA OFFICER CONTACT LIST CALENDAR OF EVENTS (U.S.) August 25/26: Raleigh, NC Fall Tournament Chris (919)781-GAME; gggc@nc.rr.com September 1-2: San Francisco, CA 2nd Annual Dote Sensei Memorial Tournament Danny Swarzman danny@stowlake.com September 29: Durham, NC Joe Shoenfeld Memorial Marathon Go Tournament Paul Celmer; (919)779-7925 September 1-2: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada: Canadian Open Steven Donaldson; mailto:sdonaldson@jsquared.com September 6-9: Lake Andrusia, Northern Minnesota: James Kerwin Weekend Go workshop $400 includes tuition, lodging, and meals. Limited to 15 participants. Bill Petersen; 218-335-2428; mailto:peterw@paulbunyan.net September 8-9: Corvallis, OR: Go Workshop with Janice Kim Robert O'Malley 541-738-1690; mailto:omalley@oce.orst.edu Gail Cape; mailto:gailcape@home.com September 15: Lancaster, PA: Jack Frost Special Sam Zimmerman; (717) 892-1249; szimmerman@wareunl.com September 21-23: Gaithersburg, MD: Kerwin Weekend Workshop Gordon Fraser; (301) 540-2640; gordon@clark.net October 27/28: Houston, TX 2001 Texas Open and AGTC Tournament Mike Peng (281)228-4233 pmpeng@swbell.net ABROAD: September 8-9: New Zealand Go Championships Auckland, NZ Colin Grierson coling@ihug.co.nz NOTE: this listing is not all-inclusive, featuring only upcoming tournaments in the next month or events which require early registration. For a complete U.S. listings, go to http://www.usgo.org/usa/tournaments.html For the European Go Calendar see http://www.win.tue.nl/cs/fm/engels/go/tourn.html SCOREBOARD: Northern Virginia NOVA Congress Tune-Up: July 14 18 players Dan: Trevor Morris, 5d, 4-0, 1st; Cheng Xiang, 5d, 3-1, 2nd; Chuck Robbins, 2d, 2-2, 3rd Upper Kyu: Ray Hunley, 2k, 3-1, 1st; Barna Rubin, 2k, 3-1, 2nd; John Moses, 3k, 3-1, 2nd; Bill Cobb, 6k, 2-2, 3rd Mid Kyu: Ray Kaufman, 10k, 3-1, 1st Lower Kyu: Alex Tsuchida, 22k, 4-0, 1st (promoted to 19k); Max Peterson, 15k, 2-1, 2nd. Next up is the Pumpkin Classic, on Saturday, 27 October. Be there! GO NEWS Korea Sweeps World Youth Goe Championship by Roy Laird, AGA President Continuing their domination in recent years, Korea won both divisions of this year's World Youth Goe Championship (WYGC). Kim Hyung-hwan, 14, won the Senior Division, while Kwon Hyung-jin topped the field in the Junior Division (under 12). Neither player lost a game. North American players had a middling result this year. Curtis Tang, 8, made his way into the final four, defeating the Japanese and Singapore players, while losing to the angelic Ilia Chikchine from Russia, who beat him again in the final round to place third. (Curtis ended in fourth place.) WYGC veteran Eric Lui, playing for the first time in the Senior Division, lost to the Taiwanese, Hungarian and Russian players, while defeating the Czech player. Richard Liang of Canada had just given Eric a tough fight in the final round of the Redmond Cup, losing two games in a row but only by a total of five points. He prevailed over Ukrainian player Mike Kozlov, as well as Gina Shi, a young 1-dan from San Francisco who was invited to round out the field. But he fell short against Cai Geng Yang, a prodigy who also represented Singapore in the recent World Amateur Go Championship, and the lightning-paced Pal Borach who also got the best of Eric Lui. This year's event was organized by Ernest Brown and Mike Bull of American Ing Goe, with the assistance of the American Go Association, on the tropical island of Maui. American Ing Goe and the AGA are grateful to the Ing Foundation for entrusting this wonderful event to our care for the third time. Next year's WYGC will take place in Thailand. In a shocking surprise move, the US State Department refused at the last minute to grant visas to the players from the People's Republic of China - an especially embarrassing twist, considering that Chinese children generally among the strongest in the tournament. The idyllic setting drew a record number of parents, but it did not distract the children. At a luau everyone attended on Tuesday, the host joked, "Here on Maui we don't eat until we're full - we eat until we're tired." Similarly, all twenty players stayed after their morning and afternoon games were finished to review them with their coaches, then returned to the playing area after dinner to play long into the night. Occasionally they could be found a few hundred yards away, frolicking on one of the world's most spectacular beaches, but this was a rare sight. When visiting professional Kim Myung-wan analyzed the Junior championship game after the banquet, every player in the tournament showed up to listen and learn. Good fellowship and camaraderie was abundant everywhere among these twenty children from ten countries who shared a universal language, a game whose names in Asia include the apt term "hand talk." That's what the tournament is really all about. Japanese Consulate General Offers Help to Midwest Go Community "I would be happy to advertise any go-related events in, or pertaining to, our jurisdiction," offers New e-Journal subscriber Chip Meyer, Educational and Cultural Affairs Outreach Coordinator for the Consulate General of Japan at Chicago. He's willing to pass along news about go events in his region, which includes Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Email him at JICChip@aol.com or call (312) 280-0431. Memorize 100 Pro Games and Call Me In the Morning. A new study offers new evidence of the difference between professional and amateurs. "The 'chunking' theory of chess playing suggests that expert memory is based on a large database of chunks in long-term memory," reports Nature magazine. The report tested brain activity in chess grandmasters as well as top amateurs. While amateurs exhibited activity in the media temporal lobe in amateur players, grandmasters were found to have activity in the frontal and parietal cortices. "Experts differ," reports Nature, "not only in the extent of their knowledge, but also in its organization. High-level processing elements, such as structuring knowledge and planning, assist in accessing the respective chunks." Chess grandmasters, notes Nature, study and practice "for at least 10 years to learn more than 100,000 patterns (memory chunks). Consequently, grandmasters can 'recognize' the key elements in a problem situation much more rapidly than amateur players." The story is available at www.nature.com Go Review: Gogod Database Reviewed by Charles Matthews Game collections aren't really a novelty. Student pros in Japan used to be sent away to play through the games of Shusaku, the dead master taking the weight off the shoulders of the living. In the PC era, you can collect up game files in the standard SGF format, click through them, or even get a screensaver to do that work for you. Going further and applying the computer's power as research assistant is the object of the Gogod Database bundle under review. It comprises around 12,000 games from the whole historic and geographical range of high-level go, including a high proportion of the most interesting and significant records around. It also comes with a number of software tools on the CD-ROM. I have spent the most time using Go Library, which is a versatile program for searching the collection to match data or positions. This would afford practical help with study for any dan player. There is also John Fairbairn's massive index to names of players from all eras, providing fascinating historical background to the games, and a special tool for finding instantly variations in the avalanche opening. I have spent most time using Go Library, which is a versatile program for searching the collection to match data or positions. This would afford practical help with study for any dan player. It's a tidy single screen, written in Delphi, with all commands self-explanatory icons or buttons. One can enter a pattern stone by stone on one board, have the machine match all occurrences in a period of years (say 1980-1989), and in a range of moves (say the first 50 of a game) and then play through the corresponding games on a second board. This allows easy tracking of full scale opening patterns. To look at corner openings in context, one uses the very useful 'rotations' facility: enter a pattern once, and the search will apply the 16-pass examination of games to check for its occurrence in all symmetric places, and with either colour. Searches may be saved for later use. I have applied this tool for studies of fuseki, joseki and middlegame techniques around corner enclosures, as well as to select games of particular players. Ordering: the database is currently available exclusively from Gogod tmark@gogod.demon.co.uk, dollar price $55 including charges. ONLINE GO: Igowin - Your First Go Tutor by Terri Schurter Playing a human contestant online is much better than playing a computer any day. Total novices, however, sometimes need a little practice before they face off against a human being. It is also a good idea to learn how to play well enough so you don't get asked the dreaded question, "Do you know the rules?" Can newbies avoid embarrassment without making a financial investment in a sophisticated computer go program? You bet they can! Igowin -- the free 9x9 version of "Many Faces of Go" authored by David Fotland --comes to the rescue. You can download Igowin at http://www.smart-games.com/igowin.html The file is less than a meg, takes very little time to download, and fits on a floppy disk, thus sharing is easy, and encouraged by the author. Use Igowin to introduce your friends at the office to the game of Go. Enlightening your online friends is as simple as providing the above link in an email. Once you download igowin.exe double click the file to install it. After installation I did not see Igowin in my startup menu, so I created a shortcut to the desktop by right clicking on the program file in the folder that was created on installation. If you have trouble finding the file, just do a search for "igowin" on your C drive. Igowin includes an electronic version of "The Way To Go" which explains the rules of the game. The program is fun to play primarily because it keeps track of your progress and assigns you a rank, which may be a bit generous. It had been awhile since I had played Igowin, and I decided to try to push it as far as I could go. I remembered having reached a rank of 6k for one game awhile ago. This made me suspect that I was either really good at 9x9, or Many Faces was too generous with ratings. I am 14k AGA. Igowin comes preset at 25k and offers a handicap of five stones at that level. You have to play a few games to reach your level, but progress is fast enough. If you win the first game, and let's hope you do, you will be immediately promoted to 20k. I won six games in a row to take me to 14kyu, which is my current AGA rating. I lost my next game... so much for expectations of generosity. I then struggled up to 8 kyu where I got to play white, but only once. In a few more games I settled in at 10k-9k, which is reasonable given my rating. My only criticism of Igowin is the inability to preset a starting rank, other than all the way back to 25k. If one could set a starting rank at any level it would make it easier for a group of people using the same computer to share the program. However, the speed with which you can force the program to your own level through a few quick games makes this a minor issue. David Fotland has told me that if you have multiple logins on your computer that Igowin will remember the ranks for each one, so there is a way around this problem if you care to use multiple logins. In my opinion Igowin serves as a great introduction to the game of Go, and should be installed on every school computer in the nation. Maybe Bill Gates should be including it as part of the Windows Operating System with a link to the Gaming Zone. Terri Schurter -- onlinego@usgo.org -- has been playing go online since 1995. Her club, Wings Across Calm Waters [http://www.wingsgoclub.org], is a "virtual" chapter of the AGA. Wings meets week-nights on the Zone from 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm Eastern Time, and on Wednesday nights at 8P on KGS. Terri plays under the name goddess_of_go. Past columns are archived at http://www.britgo.org/gopcres/agaart/index.html The views expressed in this column are not necessarily those of the American Go Association. Easy Money Send us a 150-word review of a go book or go software and - upon acceptance -- we'll give you a $25 gift certificate to the go vendor of your choice. Tell us what you liked - or didn't like - and how it helped (or didn't help) your game. Include the book's title, publisher, cost, your name and email address. Choose any book you like, from brand-new publications to old stand-bys that you keep going back to. Also, be sure to indicate what level player is best served by the material. GET LISTED & BOOST TURN-OUT! Got an upcoming event? Reach over 2,500 readers coast-to-coast every week! 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Send your tournament data to MAILTO:ratings@usgo.org AGA OFFICER CONTACT LIST: President; Roy Laird: mailto:president@usgo.org Eastern VP; ChenDao Lin: mailto:vp-eastern@usgo.org Central VP; Jeff Shaevel: mailto:vp-central@usgo.org Western VP; Larry Gross: mailto:vp-western@usgo.org Treasurer; Ulo Tamm: mailto:treasurer@usgo.org Membership Secretary; John Goon: mailto:membership@usgo.org Chapters Coordinator; Bill Cobb: mailto:chapters@usgo.org Tournament Coordinator; Mike Bull: mailto:tournaments@usgo.org Education Coordinator; None Redmond: mailto:education@usgo.org Congress Liaison Officer; Chris Kirschner: mailto:cngrsliaison@usgo.org AGA website; Gordon Fraser and Chuck Robbins: mailto:webmaster@usgo.org American Go Foundation; Terry Benson: mailto:terrybenson@eudoramail.com AGA Librarian; Craig Hutchinson: mailto:archives@usgo.org Published by the American Go Association Material published in " AMERICAN GO E-JOURNAL" may be reproduced by any recipient: please credit the AGEJ as the source. To make name or address corrections - notify us at the email address below. Story suggestions, event announcements, Letters to the Editor and other material are welcome - subject to editing for clarity and space -- and should be directed to: Editor: Chris Garlock email: journal@usgo.org Voice: 202-857-3410 Fax: 202-857-3420