Wednesday, January 09, 2008

All About Life And Death

I am having another lesson tomorrow. In my most recent lesson I was told to do more puzzles meaning more life and death. I have a few ways to study life and death. I have the problems that come with SmartGo. I have The "Get Strong At Life And Death" book. I also have the Davies "Life and Death" from the Elementary Go Series. I have read through parts of both of these books from time to time, but have never read straight through either one of them. I also have "1001 Life and Death Problems" from the Mastering The Basics series of books.

But the jewel in my collection of life and death books is the two volume set by Cho Chikun "All About Life And death", which is currently out of print.

The way I study my collection of go books, not just life and death, is way too random. I flit from topic to topic rarely finishing one book before I have torn into another.

I want to set a goal for myself to really spend time with the Cho Chikun books and play through all of the diagrams in the two volume set of "All About Life And Death". I started yesterday with my single convex yunzi stones which made it really easy to pick up the stones from the variations without destroying the initial positions. I am working through Part 1 - Life and Death On The Second Line, and have gotten through Pattern 9.

I might make sgf files of each of the patterns so I can upload them to KGS and present them to my students. There are 346 patterns in the two volumes. Creating the sgf files would be good reinforcement. I wouldn't bother to add the comments to the files because I would have the books to refer to during the online analysis of the positions. If I did an sgf file with multiple positions for each Part I would have ten sgf files representing the patterns in the book. For instance, Part 1 is Life and Death On The Second Line and it consists of 22 patterns.

Perhaps this is just some crazy task I won't complete, but it would be really nice to have those files on my tablet to review. That way I can look at the position without seeing the continuations on the pages of the book. It would be a good way of reviewing the information to refresh my memory from time to time.

I need to able to recognize more positions from sight without having to read them out each time.

4 comments:

You Haven't Heard of Him said...

Life and death, life and death, life and death. It seems it is the most important thing to study. I think that getting those diagrams into .sgf would be great. I am currently reading "Life and Death" and "Graded Go Problems for Beginners 25-20k." The Go Problems books is a bit basic for me, but it's good reinforcement.

Bob Solovay said...

Mirel Florescu (my teacher) has me working through the cho elementary problems on the Tasuki website. (The URL is http://tsumego.tasuki.org/?page=tsumego

In times past, I've found Graded Go Problems volume 2 challenging.

The Tasuki problems don't have answers. My teacher corrects my answers but I find now that I know when I've solved a problem. (That wasn't true at first.)

Bob Solovay said...

A shorter URL for the Tasuki page is:
http://shurl.net/6QT

Terri said...

Bob,

I have the cho pdf files from that site. These are good.

Terri