This is what we’re all doing at every move in a game - we are “just picking a point on the board”, but in order to pick the best possible point, we have to use a lot of reading and evaluation. And the stronger you get, the more able you are to actually use extra time in a productive way - if I have thought about a move for 30 minutes, I probably won’t learn much more by thinking for another 30 minutes. So that’s why it sounds impressive that someone thought for 5 hours, it indicates that they are able to read very deeply and keep a lot of different variations and evaluations in their head!
But this is definitely a thing that can be overhyped - someone thinking for a long time about one move is of course not impressive in isolation. It’s only impressive in the context of the respect I already have for strong go players, and knowing how much reading they can do in just a few seconds! It’s hard to say how productive those 5 hours really were, but it’s interesting to think about and kind of inspiring to me.
From 2015 onwards, Belgian go life restarted progressively: the number of members grew up progressively (124 in 2016…to compare with 75 in 2013), and so did the participation in the various activities … [and we saw] the re-birth of the review “Belgo”: 2 issues were published in 2015 and 2 other issues in 2016.
Also, I didn’t know that famed master SL librarian Dieter Verhofstadt was the eight president of the Belgian Go Federation (2001-3). He doesn’t mention it on his homepage.
Beware – you start off with just an article now and again. Then you start checking RecentChanges. And then surfing RandomPage. Eventually, you end up here:
The SL page uses “dan” to describe the levels. The wikipedia doesn’t use dan.
The guy on SL who used dan to describe the levels admitted he didn’t know Chinese. The main text seems to agree with wikipedia, 8th and 9th as the lowest levels.
“Go is now like a marriage I’ve been in for too long: ambiguous feelings about waking up next to the same person every day, but I know I’m too old to find someone new. Best to get to know her as well as I can.”
In 1997, Darren [Cook] posted a question on the computer go mailing list:
At the recent FOST Cup I asked the participants two questions. When do you think a computer will be shodan level? and when do you think a computer will be able to beat any human player? Shodan level is ‘international shodan’, which is maybe 3 dan in Japan, 2 dan in America, 1-dan in Europe.
John Tromp replied with: I wonder if people would still make such optimistic estimates if they had to back it up with, say, a $1000 bet. I (a Dutch 1kyu in 1997) would happily bet that I won’t be beaten in a 10 game match before the year 2011.
and Darren accepted under the following conditions: Yes, assuming these conditions:
It can be anyones program - it does not have to be mine :-).
It need not be the commercially available version (to prevent you learning weaknesses).
I can choose the year to play and don’t have to wait until 2011.
And so the bet was on.
In December 2010, John Tromp won the match with a score of 4-0, playing against Many Faces of Go. The games were played with a 110 minute sudden death time limit. The match to decide the bet was held at the London Open Tournament , John was then an EGF 2 Dan, according to the European Go Database,
This was 27 years after British Champion Matthew Macfadyen had claimed, in 1983, that he could give any computer thirteen stones.
