I’ve noticed there are a few different ways the board coordinates are represented in Go.
OGS coordinates are laid out like a Chessboard from white’s perspective, Quadrant 1 in a coordinate plane. Easy peasy.
My physical board (silicone tournament goban from WE Games) can be read a couple different ways. Keeping all the numerical coordinates right side up, it reads as a chess board flipped on the vertical axis, with alphabetic coordinates in ascending order from right to left, or like Quadrant 2 in the coordinate plane.
It can also be viewed with the numbers upside-down as a Quadrant 4 graph, where it mimics the form of Nick Sibicky’s demo board, except that Nick’s board labels the x-axis with Arabic numerals and y-axis with Kanji instead.
Back to my board…
Rotated 90 degrees clockwise, it can be read like a Quadrant 1 chessboard, but with letters and numbers swapping roles.
Rotated 90 degrees anticlockwise , it makes no sense at all lol.
I feel that the most popular system in western go is the letter/number system mentioned on senseis, with A1 being the lower left corner. Interestingly they mention the lack of I, however with confusing (wrong) explanation:
Note: Historically the letter I is not used to avoid confusion with J.
l suppose confusing I with J isn’t that easy. But did you notice that previous sentence starts with lowercase L ?
When you’re teaching you want things to be clear. Whenever the students have to call out a position, they invariably can’t - they usually just call out the column, and hope that Nick knows which row they mean.
Right. Just a strange choice for an American Audience.
I think Nick likes to encourage awareness of Japanese Go terms, but he himself rarely refers to the coordinates or says the Japanese numbers. So it remains, IMHO, a bit of a silly choice for the context.
I agree. His live audience frequently fumbles around trying to correctly designate the point for a suggested move or a question. Sometimes they waste time going back and forth because Nick doesn’t know what they are referring to. This could be easily fixed if the characters on the left were taped over with English letters.
I’ve always thought i, j, l were all issues, and i is the intersection of confusion, so it’s the one that makes the most sense to remove. So I think not either or, but both and
I love Nick’s board; letters are so hard to form associations with, but we all spend 12+ years getting intimately familiar with how large numbers are and which are bigger and smaller than which other ones. That’s why I use Japanese coordinates on OGS (same as Nick’s board)
That sounds like a them problem; git gud but seriously, they’re labeled in Arabic numerals up top if you need a reminder
Go is a strange choice of game for an American audience
During one of the most famous series of games of all time, the official live commentary used a demo board that had both “i” and “j”, and put “A1” in the top-left
but seriously, they’re labeled in Arabic numerals up top if you need a reminder
