Appearances deceive

The picture above is a good illustration of the concept that unless you know the deep meaning and context of a situation, you may misunderstand it. For most people in the West, this picture looks very strange: a few officially-dressed men staring intensely and what looks like a bunch of pebbles lying on a block of wood. In fact, of course, these are top players of the deep strategic board game of Go analyzing a situation.

The same goes for frum Jews in general and Chabad in particular. 99% of people (Jews and non-Jews) think that Chabad is just a very large soup kitchen with missionary inclinations. In reality, Chabad is all about making this world into a dwelling for its Creator. The soup kitchen is just one way to achieve this.

What does it mean to own information?

I am quoting below my post in a go thread lamenting the widespread "piracy" of go writers' books (most of which are not actually available in many bookstores). I already discussed the non-scarcity argument before (after the videos), but here I also address the arguments "if you pirate my work, my sales will drop" and "the law says this is copyrighted".

* * *

[I wrote the following statement in a previous post: "It is funny that book writers make money from writing about other people's so-called 'intellectual property' (the games they played, the move combinations they invented, etc.) and do not reimburse the players or their families, yet they complain about the 'piracy'. Hypocritical much?"

Someone answered that a particular game played between two people is not recognized by law as intellectual property, while a book discussing that game is. Here is my retort.]

What difference does it make whether some law protects something or not? You are merely saying that a large organization with a lot of guns recognized something arbitrarily as "property" and decided to give monopoly to it. Imagine that my friend is a Russian mafia mobster who "recognizes" all possible piano concerts by all pianists (and sales of tickets to them) in South Brooklyn as his property. He has a lot of guns too (admittedly, not as many as the Federal government). Therefore what?

Whether or not something is legal and whether or not something is moral have nothing to do with each other. There are plenty of cases from history when things were legal but not moral or illegal but moral. For example, American democratically elected state governments at some point recognized slaves as property, protected slavery by law, and recognized assisting slaves to escape as illegal. The first "patents" were actually permissions to rob foreign merchant ships that were granted by European governments at times of war.

Remember, every time you apply a law, you're applying force and violence. You're telling people what to do with their property (such as "you may not use your hard drive and the data on it in this particular way"). When you apply violence/force to someone, you better have a good reason for doing so. The only reason that I see is when you're defending your property or yourself from violence being applied to them. For instance, if I take your pencil, you can use force to take it back. Why? Because the pencil is scarce. Only one of us can use it. So, violence will be applied to one of us. So, let us choose the lesser of two evils and let the force NOT be applied to the one who has a better claim to the pencil.

But information is non-scarce. When I use your idea, that in no way prohibits your use of the same idea. So, scarcity cannot be used as justification.

Your sales will drop if I redistribute the contents of your book for free? Well, you don't own future potential sales. You don't own your potential customers, their money, and their potential custom. If I open a shop right next to yours, I am not "stealing" the customers from you, since you never owned them to begin with. When you're saying that information is property, you're saying that you own potential future business transactions. But that is clearly ridiculous, since it contradicts other people's ownership of themselves and their property.

In general, utilitarian arguments cannot be used as a basis for morality. Such arguments allow nine people to rip a tenth person apart and harvest his organs. [...]

Let me repeat my previous question: does the writer of Kamakura owe nothing to Go Seigen and Kitani Minoru for using their completely new and very specific ideas? Why is it that the specific way of arranging black-and-white letters on paper is "property", but a specific way of arranging black and white stones on a somewhat thicker piece of wood is not?

Double-convex yunzi stones

Anniversary (ke"h) present from my wife:





Ordered on Amazon here (originally from Yellow Mountain Imports). The bowls and the bag look just like advertised:


If you're looking for something alternative to glass and cannot afford shell and slate, I recommend these stones very strongly. They are very beautiful and feel very nice when held or placed on the board. If you wash and oil them (make sure to use only mineral oil; definitely no food oils!.. afterwards, wipe the excess oil off), they will feel very smooth. And they have a nice feeling of heaviness and shapiness.

Black stones have deep, rich, chocolaty color to them. White stones have a beautiful light-greenish glow (hard to capture in the pictures) when sitting together in a bowl.

Stepping stones

One of the things that immediately attracted me to go was its visual beauty. Some pictures from Flickr:

Double-seki

Seki is a situation in go when two groups have locked each other in a stalemate. I.e., normally, by the end of the game, a group is either alive (because it has two eyes) or dead (because it does not have two eyes and is surrounded by another group). In seki, if the Black moves in a given part of the board, he loses his group. And the same goes for the White. So, neither of the players can move locally. Liberties surrounded by stones in seki are not counted (according to the Japanese rules).

This is an example of a double-seki (on the left top corner and on the left-middle):

(source)

As you can see, if the White moves within the seki (e.g., at D17), its group gets captured (by Black E15). The same goes for the Black (D17 leads to White B17). And the same is true for the other two groups (playing at C11 by either Black or White leads to an immediate capture).

In fact, it’s also true for the White’s "inside" group and the Black’s group around it (White can threaten to capture the Black’s "middle" group by playing at E15, but then it gets captured at D17). So, this can be called triple-seki!

Go Seigen vs. Kitani Minoru

Go Seigen and Kitani Minoru are two of the greatest go players of the 20th century. Both were great innovators in the game. Go Seigen (born in China) is considered one of the biggest geniuses in Go since the game's importation to Japan from China. Kitani Minoru, in addition to being a famous Go player himself, is also well known for his dojo, in which many great masters of go were taught as his students.

As Wikipedia states:

In 1933, along with his great friend Kitani Minoru, Go Seigen developed and popularized the shin fuseki ["new opening" theory] that broke away from the traditional opening patterns. It is for this very important contribution that Go Seigen and Kitani Minoru are recognized as the fathers of modern Go.

This happened during a series of matches between the two great players. The games of the match are described in detail in a very good book by John Fairbarn, Kamakura (named after the temple in which the match series happened). The author describes both the games themselves, with deep but accessible analysis, and the historical background surrounding each game. You can read the few excerpts from the book here.

An episode from the movie about Go Seigen, The Master of Go, that shows the first of the matches:

Sad stone

A very interesting thread on the Life in 19x19 forum. It's a game which two people play publicly, at the same time commenting on their thought process and receiving comments (but not suggestions, I assume) from others. (I am guessing the opponents cannot read each other's comments, or choose not to, since the comments are "hidden".)

I found this comment funny:

If you listen carefully, you can hear  sobbing.

In addition to not helping the corner much and begging to be sealed in, it damages the two-space extension on the outside.

Anyway, I recommend looking at these these so-called Malkovitch games (after the movie Being John Malkovitch, in which the main character gets to enter the actor John Malkovitch's mind.) Not only are they entertaining, but also quite instructive.

As a bonus, an interesting part from Hikaru no Go (unfortunately, the embedding still doesn't work properly):

Trying new things

A good sense that go players acquire is in how to balance trying out new things and relying on already known concepts and techniques.

For instance, if you're not sure how to invade that corner, maybe choose the safer option of settling on the side. And in general, don't create over-complicated situations that require reading beyond your skills (I noticed recently that I tend to do that); instead, play solidly.

On the other hand, if you don't try new things, you will get stuck on your current level.

The way I tend to resolve this dilemma is by learning a new concept in a book, trying to see how it is applied by pro players in their games, doing some related go problems, and then, when I feel confident I understand (at least in theory) the concept, I try to apply it in my games. Usually failing the first few times...

Anyway, what lead me to thinking about all of the above? This cartoon:


(source)

Speaking of corner invasions, interesting post.

Go is a family game

Enjoying a go game on my new go board with my new go stones with my (same) wife. We were playing at Sharon Go Club, at Walpole Mall's Barnes and Noble. My wife took nine stones.


(sorry for picture quality; taken with my old phone's camera)

Close to the end of the game:



My wife won by 4.5 points. Go wife!

Speaking of the new stones, I am getting used to the feel of single-convex stones. Although they do not produce the same "click" as the double-convex stones do (at least in my hands and on cheaper shin-kaya boards), their sound is deeper and somehow richer (one must learn not to slam them on the board as one does with the double-convex stones, but release them off one's finger nail in a double movement). When one puts them down, one gets a satisfying feeling of "completeness" as they snap onto the board without wobbling. Placing these stones on the board is less aggressive, but more precise and elegant. People have said that to them these stones look too flat and lifeless, but to me, they look somehow more secure and hugging the board.

All this discussion about the feel and look of the stones may seem superficial (and it is), but Go is called the game of "hand-talk" not without a reason. This is one of the many examples when a good medium facilitates the flow and expression of thought.

During the game analysis we did make use of the stones' single-convex feature by placing them on the opposite sides to mark the variation moves.

Anyway, to each his own, of course. I am considering ordering yunzi double-convex stones from Yellow Mountain Imports in the future.

Speaking of Yunzi stones, one has to make sure to wash and oil them in order to enjoy their texture and look fully. More than complete instructions here.

Tesuji Flash I

Does anyone have any ideas as to what's happening on the left side of the picture? (Click on the image to enlarge.) My guess is that a doctor is removing an arrow fragment from a samurai's arm, and the samurai is using Go as a distraction from pain.

It's also interesting that the samurai is playing White (one might imagine that his opponent was the court master of Go, whose job would be to entertain and teach the samurai; so, the master would take White, being a more skilled player; then again, maybe the opponent is simply another samurai), that they are sitting on chairs, not on the floor, and that they are playing on a table board, not on a traditional floor goban (I guess that ties in well with the chairs).

[Update: see below.]

Also note the samurai's beard. Actually, the guy in the middle also has a beard and looks a little like Rabbi Y.Y. Jacobson.

In any event, on to the main part of this post:

Tesuji (local move combinations) are my favorite aspect of Go games right now. Therefore, I present you with with the following Tesuji Flash from Go World magazine, No. 1, May–June 1977.



Update: Regarding the picture — it turns out, the main character of the picture is Chinese general Guan Yu. From Wikipedia's description of the picture:

A 19th-century Japanese woodcut of Guan Yu by Utagawa Kuniyoshi. In this scene he is being attended to by the physician Hua Tuo while playing Weiqi [Chinese name for Go].

 I guess that explains the table board and the chairs.

Single-convex go stones

Everyone knows the traditional Japanese bi-convex stones for Go:



Fewer people know that another, Chinese, variety of go stones exists — the single-convex stones (compare the one on the right with the rest):


(source)

A bit of information from one of the places one can buy these stones nowadays, Yellow Mountain Imports:

These stones are "single convex." One side is flat with a slight rounding on the edge, the other is fully rounded. Whether to play with single convex or double convex is a matter of personal taste. In general, Chinese Go players prefer these single convex stones for their feel and louder solid "snap" when played on the board.

One can hear this "snap" when viewing this game commentary made by a Chinese professional go player.

In addition to the aesthetic quality, the single-convex shape has three more uses: a) when analyzing game variations, one can put the discussed stones with their flat side up — this way it is easy to see the "side-variation" of the board position vs. the "main version" of the game; b) single-convex stones are less easily dislodged from their position if the board is bumped (or if one accidentally drops a stone from the above or touches stones with his sleeve); c) according to Chinese rules, one must count the stones placed on the board as a part of one's score — turning stones over marks them as already counted.

On the other hand, they are a considered to be a little more difficult to pick up from the board at the end of the game or when removing captured stones — but I have not found it difficult at all; you just need to apply a little leverage with your thumb (although it's true that you can't pick up two or three at a time as with the bi-convex stones). If you watch the video linked above, you'll see that the player picks up the stones quite easily.

Also, here, a boy picks up a large group of captured single-convex stones (at the same time demonstrating the "snap-back" tesuji):



The most famous material for making these stones is yunzi (although nowadays, bi-convex yunzi stones are also available):


(note the greenish glow around the black stone)

When buying single-convex stones, one must make sure he has the appropriate board for them. Only size 3 stones will fit the standard Japanese boards (where the spacing is slightly smaller than on the Chinese boards). Sizes 4 and 5 are for Chinese go boards only. Of course, one can get Chinese go board (or a full set), but some people prefer Japanese shin-kaya or kaya wooden boards to Chinese bamboo ones because of the Japanese boards' beautiful acoustic qualities.

Some more pictures of single-convex stones (source):





Stones from Russia:



(As you can see, Russian single-convex stones are more convex than the modern Chinese оr Japanese ones. I am not sure how easy they are to handle.)






Then again, if you're a fan of bi-convex stones, you can go nuts and get these:

Leaving options open

When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. This does not mean that the enemy is allowed to escape. The object is to make him believe that there is a road to safety and thus prevent his fighting with the courage of despair.

— Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Ch. VII

In Judaism, there is a law (in halachos of warfare) that one should not enclose a city completely during a siege, leaving an option for the besieged to leave the city (I am not sure whether to flee or to surrender). This way, not only are you being merciful to the besieged, giving them an option not to perish, but also the ones who do not immediately decide to surrender will fight halfheartedly, the option of leaving the battle always on their mind. If, on other hand, you seal them in completely, they will fight to death — much more fiercely.

When talking about relationships, Rabbi Gottlieb compares the above to the difference between being married and dating. When one is married, one is "sealed in" (although one can still get divorced, chv"sh, the barrier to do so is much higher than to breaking up). As a result, any problem that one encounters, one will fight on much more severely and stubbornly than if one were merely dating. Even if one is in a so-called "long-term relationship" — let's say, a couple has been together for close to a year — it is much easier to break up over the same problem that one might encounter during one's shanah rishoina.

I think the same distinction applies not only to secular-style dating, but even to the shidduchim. On the one hand, one wants to find out as much as possible about his perspective spouse. On the other hand, certain things are better left unknown — until the couple are married, when such things should be dealt with. Once one is "sealed in", one fights with a greater effort and can accomplish things he did not know he could.

I am talking about things that can theoretically be solved within the context of marriage (i.e., there is a good chance that the couple can deal with them — even with some difficulty — once they come up). Obviously, many things should be known before one commits. It is a matter of balance. I suspect that the balance may be off-set in the modern shidduchim, contributing to so many people unable to find a partner for a long time.

This also touches on the idea of length of a shidduch. The shorter the shidduch, the less one finds out about one's perspective spouse. This has the danger of remaining ignorant of things that one better find out about before one is married. But the longer one dates, the more one is likely to find something out that will ruin the general "mood" of the shidduch — something that could be certainly dealt with once the couple were married.

That is why in certain communities (including, to a large extent, Lubavitch community), the general custom is to find out about the most important, crucial things, and leave the rest to be worked on during the first year of marriage.

* * *

In a game of go, one is oftentimes confronted with choices. It goes without saying that there are many choices of good moves on the board during most of the game. But sometimes one has a choice between specific moves in a specific location. For instance, if I play 1a, my opponent will respond 2a, to which I will respond 3a. If I play 1b, he will respond 2b, and I will respond 3b. Etc. The micro-situation on the board will change depending on my move.

The idea I heard a few days ago is that sometimes it is useful not to play any of the choices and just tenuki — play somewhere else on the board. (The important assumption is that the sequences a, b, and c have equal value to me. Obviously, if 1a–2a–3a exchange is more valuable than the others, I should play 1a.)

Why tenuki? Well, the point is that the situation on the board is still uncertain. Let's say, the center and the right side of the board are still unsettled. Although I may have some semblance of a plan of what I want to do, I don't know perfectly how my opponent will respond. Because of this, a situation may arise on the board that favors 3b move over 3a or 3c. But if, at that point, I will have already played 1a, it will be too late to take advantage of 3b. So, best leave things unsettled, sequences still hanging in potential, until the situation changes and I have a better idea of what is more beneficial to me.

What if the opponent chooses one of the sequences himself? Well, in that case, you will respond accordingly — and you will have played (hopefully sente) somewhere else on the board first.

Last night, a situation like that actually happened. I was playing a game in a local Barnes and Noble coffee shop and had a group on the left in which there was a choice of how to make two "eyes" (two independent sets of internal liberties necessary for the group to live). The game moved on, and the bottom and the center of the board got settled. The group which was pushing on the my left-side group from the outside found itself in a shortage of liberties if I played the right tesuji (a combination of moves). But, this tesuji was possible only because I left the left-side group alone, having not chosen in which of the two ways I can make eyes. (Obviously, if my opponent would make a move there, I would have to respond. But, he also left the group alone.)

* * *

The above concept from go can be applied to everyday life in a number of ways. The obvious lesson is to leave the options open. Don't burn the bridges. Don't seal things in until you have to. In relationships too, sometimes it is helpful not to make up one's mind about a person and leave a space for the development of the relationship and your opinion about him.

In one of his articles (most of which I happen to dislike, but this one is good), Tzvi Freeman compares it to an advice that most of us heard at some point of our lives: don't tighten the screws all the way until all of them are in. You may want to leave some "wiggle room" for things to re-adjust.

* * *

Something interesting: miai (read until the end of the introductory section).

Baseball, go and fundamentals

From Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go by Toshiro Kageyama. I think this concept can be applied to many aspects of life.

Each spring sees the opening of another baseball season. This is one of my favorite spectator sports, but every year there is one thing that bothers me about it. That is the way that semi-professional, university, and sometimes even highschool stars enter the professional leagues and immediately display a skill that puts their veteran teammates to shame. 

There hardly seems to be any difference at all between amateurs and professionals. Amateurs play for pure enjoyment, while professionals play to make a living. The difference between them ought to be much greater. 

In every confrontation with a real American professional team it seems that what we need to learn from them, besides their technique of course, is how uniformly faithful their players are to the fundamentals. Faithfulness to fundamentals seems to be a common thread linking professionalism in all areas. If we consider the American professionals as the real professionals in baseball, then I think we have to consider their Japanese counterparts, who tend to pass over the fundamentals, as nothing more than advanced amateurs. 

The reason for the lack of polish in Japanese baseball is probably just the short history it has in this country. Each year, when the visiting American team makes its tour, I sense an improvement on the Japanese side, so that in another few decades, or another century perhaps, when the necessary progress in technique and mental attitude has been made, I expect to see a world championship spanning the Pacific. I feel certain that no racial physical inferiority consigns us to second place. 

The opposite case, where the difference between amateur and professional is most striking, is Japanese sumo wrestling. There even the collegiate grand champion has to enter the professional ranks in the third division down from the top and work his way up while being treated like any other raw recruit. Collegiate wrestlers lack nothing in body, weight, or strength, and they are gifted with the advantage of intelligence. The potential is there, all right, but on the other side there seems to be what can only be termed a thick barrier between amateur and professional, built by a long tradition among professionals of almost superhuman effort. It takes more than just bodily size and strength to become a professional sumo wrestler.

In the world of go also, a long tradition of intellectual combat has distilled the professional into something that an amateur can never hope to become. A professional has undergone elite training in competition from childhood; he has learned to view every other person as an opponent to be beaten down and crushed. His mental, physical, and emotional strength all have to be fully developed. If he lets up anywhere, it will show in his performance on the board and he will fail the professional test. The realm of competition is stark. 

No professional regrets the time he has had to spend studying. "I've never spent a minute studying in my life," declares Yamabe, 9-dan. Let two professionals get into a post game analysis, however, and they will go on endlessly, completely forgetting about time. Who will say that is not studying? 

The way young players have taken over the game can only be called terrifying. The time they spend studying every day defies the imagination. 

Professionals do this unquestioningly. Even a gemstone has to be polished. "A man is always moving either forward or backward," says Kano, 9-dan. "He never stands still." This should be every go player's motto, and he should keep piling effort on top of effort no matter what his age. He can be confident of always making progress.

And now, a lecture from Dywin on orthodox opening (make sure to increase the quality to at least 480p):

Atomic bomb game

(the exhibit presents the position of the game at the moment the atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima)

Interesting bit of Go history (source):

The number of go tournaments held in Japan during World War II were far fewer than those held before the war. Many young players were being drafted into military service and, because of a paper shortage, newspapers were compelled to reduce their size. Go columns were among the first to be dropped. In spite of this, newspapers continued to sponsor tournaments and games, even though they would probably never be published. 

As the war dragged on, conditions for staging even the most important games became extremely difficult. In the spring of 1945, Kaoru Iwamoto, 7-dan, earned the right to challenge Hashimoto Utaro for the third Honinbo title. However, finding a venue for the title match in bombed-out Tokyo had become impossible. 

A venue for the games was finally found in Hiroshima. However, the police chief of the city, who was an amateur go player, ordered the players not to play there, since it was too dangerous. However, when the police chief was called away on official business, the players, taking advantage of his absence, ignored his order and played the first game of the match July 23-25 under a rain of bullets from strafing airplanes. 

When the chief returned and heard that a game had been played, he was furious and fabade players in no uncertain terms from playing any more games in Hiroshima. 

Another venue was found in Itsukaichi, an outer suburb of Hiroshima, and the second game was played there Aug. 4-6. 

On the morning of Aug. 6, Hashimoto happened to be in the garden when the atomic bomb was dropped. He saw a brilliant flash of light and the mushroom cloud rise above the city. A tremendous blast of wind shattered all the windows and turned the playing room into a shambles. The position on the board had to be set up again. Under these circumstances, they managed to complete the game; Hashimoto won by five points. 

That evening, atomic-bomb survivors started to pour into Itsukaichi and the players began to understand the magnitude of the disaster and just how lucky they were. The house in which they were to have played their game was destroyed and its owner killed. 

The war ended a week later and the match was resumed in November, ending in a 3-3 tie. A playoff became necessary, but Japan was in such disarray that it was not until July 1946 that a best-of-three playoff was arranged. Iwamoto won the first two games, and thereby took the Honinbo title. 

Hashimoto and Iwamoto were important forces in the go world during the years following the war. Had they been killed in Hiroshima that fateful day, the history of go today would most likely be quite different. 

Iwamoto defended the Honinbo title against Minoru Kitani in 1947, but Hashimoto came back in 1959 to recapture it. Then, with the prestige of holding the top title in the go world at that time, Hashimoto broke away from the Japan Go Association and formed the Western Japan Go Association. Although, a bitter rivalry existed between these two organizations for a while, they coexist amicably today and cooperate on many levels to promote go in Japan. 

Iwamoto, who will be 97 on Feb. 5, has contributed much to the popularization of go in the West. In 1929, he retired as a go player and immigrated to Brazil. However, two years later he returned to Japan and resumed his go-playing career. Perhaps it was this experience that caused him to want to make go a truly international game. He has gone on numerous overseas tours and has established go centers in Amsterdam, Sao Paulo, Seattle and New York.

Just for the record, let me say this: after reading about this game, I started reading about the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, bombings of Tokyo, etc. It is my opinion that targeting civilians by bombing raids the way Allies did in the World War II in Japan (not just the atomic bombs, but also bombings of Tokyo with incendiary bombs) and Germany (e.g., Dresden, Berlin) is not much different from what Islamic terrorists do today. Probably not different at all. And therefore, there is not much difference between President Truman who made a decision to destroy two cities full of thousands of civilians (eventually leading to the deaths of close to 200,000 people) and Osama Bin Laden.

I am ashamed of the times when I excused such things by calling them collateral damage. This was not collateral damage. This was terrorism.

Let me say only this much to the moral issue involved: Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?

— Leo Szilard

Go Seigen vs. Fujisawa Kuranosuke, 1953

By the way, Go Seigen (born in China) is still alive. He is in his late 90s. Here he is young:



Apparently, after the war, Go Seigen joined some sort of religious organization/cult and as a result had to leave Japan's national Go organization. He was unable to participate in the national championships for a while. Not to worry: he played in many games against the strongest Go players; the encounters were sponsored by the newspapers and Go journals that published the records of the games.

Just another evidence that you don't need government to sponsor art and intellectual pursuits such as board games or science.

Goté and senté

This small section (from a Wikipedia article) describing two Go terms shows why I love Go so much. You don't have to know much about Go to understand it. It shows the kind of tactical and strategic encounters one sees during a Go game that makes it so much fun and also so useful for teaching one skills in everyday-life decision making. The last two paragraphs are especially interesting to me.

(Note: the terms goté and senté are pronounced as "go-teh" and "sen-teh" respectively.)

A move that leaves the player an overwhelming follow-up move, and thus forces the opponent to respond, is said to have "sente" (先手), or "initiative"; the opponent has "gote" (後手). In most games, the player who keeps sente most of the time will win. 

Gote means "succeeding move" (lit: "after hand"), the opposite of sente, meaning "preceding move" (lit: "before hand"). Sente is a term to describe which player has the initiative in the game, and which moves result in taking and holding the initiative. More precisely, as one player attacks, and the other defends in gote, it can be said that they respectively do and do not have the initiative. 

The situation of having sente is favorable, permitting control of the flow of the game. Applying these concepts to a whole sequence is basic to higher strategy. If Black starts a sequence that properly ends in an even number of plays, Black retains sente in doing this. If Black starts a sequence that properly ends after an odd number of plays, Black loses sente and takes gote. 

Accepting gote should only be in return for some profitable exchange. Correct play in the yose (endgame) can consist of playing available sentesequences, and then taking the largest gote sequence on the board. That description is a simplification, though. A reverse sente play is a special type of gote play, preventing the opponent from making some sente move. The relative value of reverse sente plays depends on the overall position, but one can count it as twice the value of what it would be if purely gote. 

A player has sente if he does not currently need to respond to moves made by his opponent. This can be achieved by tenuki (ignoring the opponent), as a kind of gambit. A player can break out of gote, and can gain sente, by choosing to accept some future loss, on the local level, in order to take the initiative to play elsewhere. 

In the case that neither of the players directly respond to each other's moves, the game can become difficult. Both players will have sente on their turn, and the moves they are making are gote. This will likely end in large exchanges, or one player will be shown to have a weaker position, and will have to start answering to avoid heavy damage.

The game of Go

Tonight seems to be an especially appropriate night to advertise one to the greatest board game ever invented, toppling even chess, namely, the game of Go (I am capitalizing it to differentiate it from the verb, but one really doesn't have to).

Play Go — it’s good for your brain

Chess is good.

Go is better. To play (or watch games), go to KGS Go Server. To learn about Go, visit Sensei’s Library.

Go is good for everything. For passing time and having fun, for developing logical skills, for developing spatial skills, for music, for science, for fencing, for — lehavdil — Gemara. It may even help with fighting off potential Alzeimer’s.

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In tractate Pesachim, it says that we don’t do an organized Torah study until we are done with bdikas chametz the night of the 14th of Nissan (since we may get so caught up in the study that we forget to do bdikas chametz or do it not thoroughly enough). Think about it: no Torah study the Eve of Pesach. Neither birthday nor yartzeit. (No chess either, though.)

People that freak me out

(a Go player)

• Chess players reading chess games off the page (actually sitting in a bus and “reading” a chess game)
• The same regarding Go players (I am not sure if it’s harder or not)
• The same thing regarding musicians readings notes off the page. (One of the weirdest experiences is sitting at 2 am Friday night and singing Chabad niggunim from memory next to a musician who is just singing them off the page for the first time in his life. By the way, there are apparently nearly a hundred niggunim called “Niggun LeShabbos VeYomTov”. Until we found the correct one, I had to sing the beginning notes around ten times. Considering that, as Russians say, “a bear stepped on my ear”, it must have looked quite amusing.)
• Mathematicians and theoretical physicists sitting down in front of a blank piece of paper (or a blank computer screen) and discovering something. (Theoretical scientists in other areas — especially Biology — are usually crap at what they do.)
  
• Artists, writers, composers sitting down in front of a blank piece of paper/computer screen and just inventing things out of blue
• Twins (OK, that’s more of a phobia).
  

Is it any wonder I am in experimental science? (And not something like molecular biology, where you pipette crap from one tube into another for hours and then peer at Western blot bands — nope, in my field you get instant gratification.)

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Obviously, I have to write more posts on Go (and Sherlock Holmes), but an experience in Go academy in 19th-century Japan was remarkably similar to an experience in yeshiva. All life revolved around one single intellectual purpose and activity.

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A Chabad niggun in many cases is like a thalamocortical cell.