On Fri, Apr 06, 2007 at 07:52:34AM +0900, Darren Cook wrote: > > The chief difference between a 9X9 game and a 19X19 is in the demands > > the larger board makes on our _strategic_ reading ability. > > Agreed. > > > And that is not merely another board-size-dependent skill, among many. > > That is the most significant difference between a competent player and a > > strong one. > > Disagreed, sorry. As I said, I think go skill applies to almost all > board sizes. If you go to a go club, try holding a no-handicap > tournament at a weird board size (e.g. 9x9, 13x13, 17x12, whatever). If > the difference between competent players was all about 19x19 strategic > knowledge you'd expect everyone stronger than about 10 kyu to tie for > first place. But what you will find is the ordering will be very close > to 19x19 go rank. (You can also see this on go servers that maintain a > different rank for each board size.)
I see two ways that something can be board-size-dependent. In the first way, the thing vanishes for small boards and grows progressively more important for large boards. I don't remember the original message, but from the quoted snippet above, I'd guess that this is what was meant by the person that you quoted but didn't attribute. That is, the importance of strategic reading ability essentially vanishes on a 4x4 board, but grows to be significant on a 19x19 board. Similarly, most kinds of endgame skill essentially vanish on a 4x4 board: it isn't very important to know the difference between sente and gote when there's only one meaningful game on the board. Thus, a large part of the difference between competent players is about strategic reading ability which vanishes on tiny boards but grows important on large boards. Strong players tend to be very clever about when they drop one fight and play to affect another, or when they steer fights into each other. No matter how much insight they have about such things, though, it doesn't help them much on a 4x4 board. Another way that something can be board-size-dependent, the way that you seem to be disagreeing with, is when what you learn on an NxN board hardly applies to an N'xN' board, even when N' is approximately equal to N. That seems strongly true of most Chess opening knowledge, for example. It's probably somewhat true of most Go opening knowledge, too: at least the acceptable joseki tradeoffs between territory and influence seem likely to change significantly. But as I said, I doubt that is what the original unnamed poster was talking about. -- William Harold Newman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> PGP key fingerprint 85 CE 1C BA 79 8D 51 8C B9 25 FB EE E0 C3 E5 7C Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit. -- Jonathan Swift's epitaph _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
