the frig blig

Feng Yun 9P defeated Yilun Yang 7P last night to win the 2008 Ing Masters tournament. The middle game featured a difficult fight, which prompted commentator Takemiya Masaki 9P to remark, “You shouldn’t have to try that hard. It’s better to think as simply as possible. Both players are too much into it — they want to win badly because it’s the final match.”
Here is Feng Yun reviewing the game of a congress participant during a lecture this afternoon.

A historic sign of the times occurred this afternoon when computer go program MoGo defeated Korean go professional Myungwan Kim 8P at the 2008 U.S. Go Congress in Portland OR. The computer played with a 9-stone handicap and won by 1.5 stones.

MoGo was written by French programmer Sylvain Gelly and ran on a borrowed European supercomputer with 800 CPUs. MoGo is available for download at Gelly’s home page.

With the current pace of technology I now expect to see computers defeating human professionals playing even games in my lifetime…a vision both exciting and depressing.

I just installed MoGo on my laptop and played it a quick game, and I’m impressed, it played some moves so good it was spooky…but MoGo’s yose sucks. OTOH I made MoGo play white…if I gave it 9 stones and more thinking time it would probably give this 8k a run for his money. I’ll try it, but not tonight.

Takemiya Masaki 9P spoke to assembled participants at the 2008 U.S. Go Congress this afternoon at Portland State University. Here’s some of what he said during the first 30 minutes:

Everyone wants to get stronger at go and everyone wants to win games. Are you playing your moves at the first spot you wanted to play? Or do you change your mind because you think that move has problems? That kind of thinking keeps you from improving.

–Takemiya Masaki, 2008-August-05

Q: How is playing guitar like shooting pool?
A: They’re both all about leave.

Viz. when playing guitar, in order to sound like less of a klutz and move smoothly to the next note or chord, the player needs to be thinking ahead about which fingers will be used in that next note or chord…and that means making sure those fingers are available by using other fingers now.

And when shooting pool, in order to sink more than a single ball, the player needs to be thinking ahead about positioning the cue ball to leave makeable shots.

Q: how is playing tennis like playing go?
A: they both can be approached using a certain style of play; i.e. keep making good returns or moves and wait for your opponent to make a mistake — then capitalize on it. With each mistake your opponent makes, he or she is more likely to try to overcompensate…to your advantage.

Yesterday during the third round of the Seattle Go Center’s monthly ratings tournament, while pondering my next move the following words crossed my mind: “Don’t have too much fun!”

That struck me as having the tone of a proverb. So I hereby submit it as one.

What it means is, don’t let the joy of pursuit get you so wrapped up that you forget to coldly calculate the balance of the game. I suppose this is just another variation on “Always consider the whole board”, but with a psychological bent.

OK gotta go.

The Portland Open Go Tournament was hosted at Lewis and Clark College this past weekend. This frog took third place in the single-digit kyu division (my record was 3-2 but I was 3-1 going into the last round, which I lost to M. Malveaux). Here are the complete results as posted by TD Peter Drake:

Dan, 1: Jang Bi
2: Chang Yu
3: Zhao Yan

Youth: Mike Tobias
Female: Akane Negishi
New: Chang Yu

Making the weekend complete, I spent the evenings socializing with S and our good friends C, C, C’s new beau R, and the J/T/M/G unit. I enjoyed playing C’s mandolin and made a short video of leaves falling from a tree. An awesome weekend for sure.

Well allright, not everyone. Last night’s final round of the Ing Masters tournament was an exciting game between Mingjiu Jiang 7P vs Feng Yun 9P. Jiang won by 3 points after Yun failed to kill his giant white dragon. Pros provided running analysis in the Galley as people watched the KGS live broadcast on video projection:

But enough about the pros; how I did in the U.S. Open? Here are the frog’s results:

1. lost vs Frederick Argenio
2. won vs Matt Palumbo
3. lost vs Kelsey Dyer
4. won vs Sean Reeves
5. won vs Rachel Small
6. lost vs James Shenko

Congratulations to my opponents who beat me. All I can say is I hope I learned from the games, it was a lot of fun, and wait ’til next year!

And speaking of next year, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the 2008 USGC will be held in Portland Oregon, one of S and my favorite cities…and within driving distance to boot!

I had hoped to record my U.S. Open tournament games this week using the gome program on my phone. Alas, it has fatal flaws, to wit:

• it crashes with ‘Unhandled exception, close application?’ when I try to save a game to a file
• it forgets moves and truncates games in Review mode

It should be possible to workaround one or the other of these bugs, but together they effectively stop me from game recording at the 2007 U.S. Go Congress, alas.

On the second day of the US Go Congress I won my tournament game and my mood brightened.

After the prior day’s loss I was gloomy, and resolved if I didn’t end up with at least a .500 record I would quit spending so much time on this game. After all, I’ve been stuck at 8k for over a year. Maybe I’ve hit the wall and am just too stupid to improve past this point. Looking around the crowded game room I am surrounded by hundreds of go players better than me. Depressing.

Winning my second game turned my mood around completely. I’m surprised at how much winning and losing influences my mood. I guess I’m a moody guy.

On the third day I lost again, bringing my record to 2-1. Gloom returns. Then at lunch a 1D from SLC sitting next to me offered to review my game. I replayed it for him from memory and he made several very instructive comments. The gloom is replaced by hope that improvement is possible, and I resolve to try and get as much value out of this week’s gathering as possible.

Go players of all ages and stripes descended on Millersville University campus last night, including A and I who arrived around midnite. A fierce three-hour thunderstorm kept many attendees up during the wee hours.

This morning’s round one of the six-round U.S. Open tournament followed tradition by starting over an hour late. After a nice start, a bad decision cost me my first tournament game by resignation.

After lunch I attended Juan Guo’s review of kyu games; she was entertaining as always. Pointing to a group of black stones in the middle of the board Guo asked the audience ‘How do you kill a fish?’…the answer was, ‘not with your hands, but with a net’.

It seemed so wonderful, but then…as the go players advanced to the cafeteria for supper, who should arrive ahead of them but zillions of highschool cheerleaders. The go players were totally outnumbered. An ignonimous moment, but is it prescient?