. . Sometimes - maybe always - a good night's sleep helps one see the picture more clearly in the morning. Therefore it is probably a good idea for me to stop writing emails late at night and shoot my mouth off because i shoot myself in the foot in the process. As i did last night.
I need to publicly thank David and Goncalo for browbeating me because the message has finally got through; for 40 years i have been bashing my head against the wall up a gum tree down a garden path, because whereas dumbclucks like me do see the Go board like they see anything else, strong players don't. All my nonsense about shapes is just that: nonsense. That's not the way to win. I think the penny has dropped and i have discovered the secret - a secret tens of thousands of others have known for decades - but need to go over it a bit more in my head first before trying to say what it is. So that's where i personally will start. Where should Genyang start? I think the best answer i can give is one that was given to me by a young woman who saw the world so much more clearly than i: "If it feels good, do it". In my former job as a teacher of computer science, i strongly felt that it was a waste of time and sweat and resources for thousands of teachers to badly reinvent the wheel by writing their own lectures when there was already so much good stuff on the web https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc4GIaPT61I&index=11&list=PL4y5WtsvtduozO-9oG5nZZI8IPUD6EDif and i think this may partly be where the angst i displayed in my previous posting comes from. But i was forgetting the pleasure that athletes get from computer olympiads and olympiads in general - indeed, if FIFA were to apply my reasoning to football, there would be only one team and no entertainment at all !! Why do people want to write Go programs? I think the answer is basically the same as the reason people play Go or football. The same reason that people play Bridge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoXgbKmQ4wA&index=19&list=PL4y5Wtsvtdurz6BhIIAnhF_0bbPr-edNd Jim mentioned that a Go game looks a bit like a fractal; yes, it does, and in some senses it is, in that it starts off as seeds scattered around the place which grow and fight and die as they compete for space when they expand, and this may partly explain the attraction of Go to artistic types, because unlike chess, it does have a kind of "natural look". Definitely scope there for artistic interpretation; perhaps one day a musician will find a way to map Go moves onto musical intervals and create a program that will play the music of a go game. Stone connections become chords, jumps are changes of pitch, etc.
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