David's Go Dojo

“Otake seemed cautious of challenging the Master at his own game. His initial object to limit the Master’s freedom of motion and avoid difficult entanglements over a broad front, he set about shaping his ranks after patterns he had made peculiarly his own. Allowing the Master a strategic point, he was all the while buttressing his own walls. What may at first sight have seemed passive was in fact a strong undercurrent of aggression and an unshakable confidence. What may have seemed mere tenacity had a surging power. True to his own uncompromising aims he would from time to time launch forth violently upon the offensive.”

“The Master of Go“, Yasunari Kawabata, pg 127 Paragraph 2

This is a typical selection from a book that I am intermittently reading. The language communicates a great deal, but manages to flip its rhetorical statement within the confines of a paragraph, 6 sentences long. It is understandable why the book was selected for the Nobel Prize for Literature (1968). It is however a sad pity that he was “found dead by his own hand, in 1972.” I will post the SGF of the game later on with some comments…

I’m up early, writing for the wiki at iShudan. I’ll be away most of the day soon, at the foot of Mount Ranier. My little boy and his mama are going with me on a trip into the “big blue room” this afternoon, and I’ll be fulfilling family duties to record and film selected moments for later transmission and archival. I might get to play a game outside with my bamboo board and jujube bowls sitting at a stump, as in ancient Indo-China. /me smiles at the thought… I’ll post a picture or two if it’s a nice game. Happy Sunday, and welcome to your second year my son.

I am proud to announce that today is the initial release of my new project, iShudan. This combines my love of two different areas together into something that I feel has immense potential for growth and utility by others.

It is an open source project currently being hosted by Google which will allow people to install and set up a web server running PHP that will allow mobile play and recording of a game via an Apple iPhone. In case you have been living under a rock for the last 6 months, or genuinely aren’t a technical person and generally stop listening after any word that starts with an unnecessary lowercase “i”, the iPhone is a genuinely fascinating device that allows someone to have and use internet access almost anywhere, simply and easily. The touchscreen interface is somewhat reminiscent of a conversation I saw some time ago on godiscussions.com about an electronic Go board: a multi purpose beautiful device that can record and replay games without the need for a laptop during tense matches or the difficult to read kifu sheets which, at least in my case, frequently end up with continuity errors and make getting an SGF file out of an over-the-board game harder than it should be.

I don’t have the memory to replay more than the first 10 moves or so of a game if at all after some study: something like this allows smartphone users with internet access a way to record it as the game is going on. Right now, I use the camera phone to take snapshots, which look snazzy enough, in my opinion. Computer vision isn’t good enough yet to take these snaps and convert them into kifu’s, although I don’t doubt that this will happen someday soon. Particularly when Sam gets back from Peace Corp… (hi sam!)

It also neatly provides a way for anyone who can host a server to start a micro-”Go club“, like this Dojo. I have many friends I speak with about Go, and they would like to play a game and do not have the time it takes to play: this remote accessible-anywhere script allows us to play a leisurely game at the pace that suits us, similar to old chess-by-mail lists that allowed players to play long term games with far away people. Gosh, what ever did people do without the Internet?

Anyway, I’d love it if you took a look, and if you have any interest or anything to contribute, if you made contact to let me know. This is an open project based on other open code, and likely to remain a public effort for the duration. I have lots and lots more to write, but its late and I have to wake up again in just a few hours.

Namaste’.