Nordic Tournament Report: 2020 Danish Championship

Report by Mathis Elmgaard Isaksen (yakago):

The story of this year’s Danish Championship started almost half a year ago. Per tradition the tournament is held every year in the long weekend of ‘All Prayers Day’ – a Danish holiday on the 4th Friday after Easter. But, as we all know, this year the COVID-19 put a stop to …

Read the full post here!


NGD Website Update

Hi folks!

I have now pushed through a fairly big update to nordicgodojo.eu. Online league participants are now able to upload their league games for review directly through the website, without need for sending an email – you can find the upload page link on the right side of the link bar if you are an online league member. …

Read the full post here!


Sunday Problem #20

This is a whole-board endgame problem from Ōhashi Hirofumi 6p’s book, (Sōkai! Kachisuji-sagashi) or Refreshing! Searching for the winning play.

If the title sounds strange in English, it is because sōkai does not translate very well; ‘refreshing’ or ‘invigorating’ are technically correct translations, but Western go players would rarely use them for the feeling of relief …

Read the full post here!


Matias on When and How to Invade

Streamed on Twitch on October 10, 2020.


Sunday Problem #19

The carpenter’s square or ichigō-masu (, meaning a small wooden container with a volume of 0.1804 litres) is one of the more dreaded tsumego shapes, especially by kyū players, which makes it an excellent topic for a Sunday Problem.

Should Black go for the carpenter’s square, or is there a better option available?

Black to play.

Solution
Standard …

Read the full post here!


World’s First Pixel Go Tournament on October 31

Registration and tournament details

List of registered participants

On October 31, we will hold the first-ever Pixel Go Tournament on the Variant Go Server programmed by seequ! This tournament is free for everybody to participate, and the top two players will each get an ngd voucher for use in their studies. Besides ngd league participations, they can also be …

Read the full post here!


NGD League Update: Short Break in Second Half of December

General announcement: our online league will hold no pairing and scheduled lecture in the second half of December, so that students and teachers alike can have a relaxing Christmas time with their friends and family.

If your online league subscription would normally be eligible for a December-II pairing, your subscription will instead carry over and you will get a pairing in the January-I pairing.


Sunday Problem #18

This shape appeared in one of Oscar’s games.

Black’s task, of course, is to live, but there are several ways to do so. The real problem is in finding the best way to live.

Black to play.

Solution
Failure 1
Even when the task is to live, you want to live with as much territory as possible. Therefore, in …

Read the full post here!


Preliminary study on anti-cheating passes peer review

I am happy to report that my and Attila Egri-Nagy’s research ‘Derived metrics for the game of Go – intrinsic network strength assessment and cheat-detection’, which I linked on nordicgodojo.eu roughly a month ago, just passed peer review and will be presented in the CANDAR’20 symposium.

Given that we got promising early results and that the subject is …

Read the full post here!


How should we learn from the AI?

My recent work got me again thinking about the nature of learning and understanding. More precisely, I got interested in thinking about the best way to use the ai in go studies.

Recent research (for example, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman) suggests that expertise in a domain is not a single skill but rather a large collection of …

Read the full post here!