AMERICAN GO E-JOURNAL: News from the American Go Association August 28, 2001 In This Edition: - CALENDAR OF EVENTS: Latest listings! - SCOREBOARD: Northern Virginia GO NEWS: Summer Journal On The Way!; Annotated Go Bibliographies Available Online; Event Haikus - YOUR MOVE: Readers Write: E-Journal "Excellent storehouse of information"; A Drink Across the Fence - SPECIAL REPORT: The Kid's Congress (Part 1) - Go Review: Tesuji Made Easy CD - ONLINE GO: Pro Game Review with JiGo - AGA OFFICER CONTACT LIST CALENDAR OF EVENTS (U.S.) Woodlands Labor Day Weekend http://brooklyngoclub.org/generic_club/cgi-bin/disp_topic.iphtml?topic_id=55 September 1-2: San Francisco, CA 2nd Annual Dote Sensei Memorial Tournament Danny Swarzman danny@stowlake.com September 1-2: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada: Canadian Open Steven Donaldson; mailto:sdonaldson@jsquared.com September 3: Akron, OH Self Pair Go Tourney Paul Motulewicz (330)928-9802 shaddam@neo.rr.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 September 29: Durham, NC Joe Shoenfeld Memorial Marathon Go Tournament Paul Celmer; (919)779-7925 transwrite2@lycos.com http://www.home.earthlink.net/~transwri/shoenfeld/ 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 GO NEWS Summer Journal On The Way! The Summer edition of the American Go Journal is at the printer now and features full reports on the 2001 US Go Congress as well as plenty of terrific instructional material. Look for it in your mailbox after Labor Day! Annotated Go Bibliographies Available Online "David Carlton's 'Annotated Go Bibliographies', on the web at http://math.stanford.edu/~carlton/go/ is a wonderful source of information about books on go in English," reports Bill Cobb. "Carlton intends to cover every go book in English, including those that are out of print, and updates the site regularly as new books appear. He provides thorough reviews of the books, and the books are listed by level and by topic as well as by publisher. The site also includes French and Italian go books. This site is a great service to the go community." Event Haikus Summer is done. Cold weather is near. If you want some fun, join us right here. - Jack Frost Special Tournament, September 15 Sam Zimmerman, 717-892-1249 szimmerman@wareunl.com You lose won games Your opening is not up to par Just plain mystified about how to improve - 5th Annual Lancaster Yang Workshop, November 1-4 Sam Zimmerman, 717-892-1249 szimmerman@wareunl.com YOUR MOVE: Readers Write E-Journal "Excellent storehouse of information" "We received the AMERICAN GO E-JOURNAL on this Tuesday. Thank you.It's a excellent storehouse of information." - Hidekazu Suzuki, Overseas Dept. Nihon Ki-in A Drink Across the Fence "Your brief notice that chess grandmasters think differently from the rest of us about chess problems refers us to www.nature.com for the story," writes Roland Crowl. Thanks for nothing. It was not easy to find the story reference because it was from the week of 9 August, not the current week - a direct link to the relevant page would have been far more useful. Second, I can't read the story because I'm not a subscriber - reference to stories we can't access is like offering us a drink but putting it on the other side of a fence we can't cross. - Roland Crowl SPECIAL REPORT: The Kid's Congress (Part 1) By None Redmond From the point of view of those of us in the Youth Room, this Congress was one of the very best. The room was in the same building as the other events, far enough away that the children could have a lot of fun and playful interchange without disturbing anyone, but close enough that adult visitors would wander in looking for the vendors and stay to play with the children. The presence of three young men who came to help was always welcomed; special thanks to James Chien, Edward Kao and Jonathan Wang. At one point on Monday, there were four professionals playing simultaneous games with the children. It must be an extraordinary experience for a young go player to feel the power of a pro so early in a go-learning career. Sam Zimmerman came in one day with three little local fellows who wanted to know what all the excitement was about. He sat them down and gave them a go lesson there and then. Several adult players had finally realized where the children were and came to share time with us. And some of the Dan strength children themselves quietly sat down with younger players and gave them teaching games. I loved seeing that, it is one of my special memories of this Congress. Also of special note were our three young guests from Russia who came with Victor Bogdanov. They were all of Dan strength and were enjoyed very much. We hope that Victor will return next year with even more young players from his country. The language of go overcomes many obstacles. On Saturday, our final day, the children always enjoy an especially wild event, the Grand Prix, a car race along a track pasted on a wall. The children run back and forth between the problem table and their team seats. If they solve their go problem at the table, the monitor there yells out the name of their team and their little car moves up another notch. It's the brain child of Steven Burrall who also TDs it helped by his wife Barbara and the four monitors at the table, Kevin Chao, Jonathan Wang, Edward Kao and James Chien. It is always exciting to see some of these children returning to Congress year after year. They play their games and make friends and renew other friendships. They make arrangements to meet on the Internet. Many of them win prizes in the adult tournaments; - young people won first place in the Dan section of the 9 x 9, the 13 x 13, and the Lightning, also in the kyu section of the Lightning and in several sections of the U.S. Open. The children are our future, the up and coming leaders of the American Go Association. Thank you all very much for teaching them, nurturing their growing skills and helping so much during the Congress. Go Review: Tesuji Made Easy CD Copyright 2000, Jiang Han, distributed by Yutopian Enterprises; $50 Minimum Requirements: 486 or higher, Windows 3.1 or higher, approx. 5 Meg HD space Reviewed by Paul Thibodeau Tesuji Made Easy is computer software with a huge collection of go problems (2440), illustrating a diverse range of technique in subcategories such as ko, shape, sacrifice, reducing or extending liberties, and sabaki, under six main themes: Life (425), Death (618), Attack (259), Defense (325), Capturing Races (217), and Endgame (596). About 30-40% of the problems are from classic texts, mainly "Guan-Zhi-Pu". They are graded from 1 to 5 stars in difficulty, with most between 3 and 5 stars, too difficult for low kyu players. You set the number of guesses you allow yourself for a problem, and your rank is then adjusted depending on whether or not you solve it. The quantity and quality of illustrated variations vary greatly. For some problems there are few or none. The shortcomings of the program itself are extensive. By far the most serious is the inability to place stones to explore variations. No analysis is possible, if the move is not in the database a 'Lost!' dialog box appears and the problem resets. You can't take back or undo a move, or reset a problem. You need to switch to another problem and come back. The program is slow, taking several seconds to switch between problems on a 486-100 with Windows 98. If you change problems while the program is illustrating a variation it will hang. A distracting red square appears on the star-point to allow cursor key entry, and almost always covers one of the stones in the problem. It can be moved but not taken off the board altogether. The 'number of guesses' option is off by one (if you put 2, you will get 1). The grading feature doesn't function properly. After solving only one or two problems the software will promote you. It keeps promoting you for resolving the same problem, which you may easily find yourself doing if you look at problems more than once. If you want to restart the ranking you need to edit the score file, which causes runtime errors. Each problem is identified by either 'have solved', 'not solved', or 'wrong answer', but are misidentified even when the program is first installed. A DOS-era style program window that won't fit at 640x480 resolution and won't fill to 800x600, a unique Pokemon-like picture associated with each rank that can't be removed, and corny sound events round out the amateurish presentation. There are also some errors in the variations. In a subvariation of Problem 1, 'Capturing Stones/Destroy Opponent's Eye Shape', Black puts his whole group into atari instead of starting a ko, while in Problem 5 of 'Endgame Moves/Invade', White appears to needlessly connect after blocking the monkey jump. The bottom line is that this program really seems to still be in beta. Nevertheless, if all you want is for it to display a Go problem and the correct solution, you will probably be happy, anything else and it will be disappointing. Beginners less than 10 kyu will definitely want to give this one a wide berth, picking up books like Tesuji, Life and Death, Attack and Defense, and Endgame from the Elementary Go Series to cover the same ground at a challenging level for about the same price. High kyu and dan players may be willing to tolerate the program's shortcomings to have access to such a large number of classic problems, but will have to resign themselves to setting up many problems on the board. ONLINE GO: Pro Game Review with JiGo by Terri Schurter JiGo is a java applet create by Dave Jarvis, available at http://www.joot.com/JiGo/ It took only a few seconds for the game board to appear when I logged on to the main page, but be patient, as you are warned that it might take up to a minute to load. The applet opens with a default game in place. You can load the game of your choice by simply pressing the "open game" button on the game board window. Navigational controls include buttons to go forward one move, backward one move, to advance to the end of the game, and to go back to the beginning of the game. Once you are finished looking at one game load another, and it will appear in the game window replacing the previous game. There appear to be in excess of 1,000 pro games available for review on the JiGo site, making it a simple and free way to acquaint yourself with the games of a number of professional players. The JiGo site is a great source of pro games, but JiGo was not designed to be used only at its home site. It is currently being featured at three locations, including the Samarkand Vendor Site where it powers the Samarkand GoBase. You can add JiGo to your own page by downloading the program and installing it on your site. As good as JiGo is now, its future looks even brighter. There are plans to upgrade the capabilities of JiGo in version 2.0, which is still in process. Slated improvements include the creation of individual programs called "JiGo Replayer", "JiGo Designer", "JiGo Guesser", and "JiGo Life & Death". You can find out details about the status of these projects at http://www.joot.com/jigo-2.0/index.shtml 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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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