You can play free or fixed handicap with any ruleset, imo
I’m not sure you get free placement if you select Japanese rules on OGS?
Yeah, but that’s an OGS quirk that it’s tied to ruleset. No reason it has to be that way besides tradition
Well having fixed placement for handicap at least makes it easier to know what a 5-stone handicap game means if you’re thinking of rating/ranking either differences or calculations.
If you don’t know how to place handicap stones effectively, 7 free placed stones can be as useful to you as 3 traditionally placed ones.
Well we are driving a bit off topic as i simply proposed a way to nerf corners.
But now i feel obliged to some answers
The reverse is true too. Some theorists sustain that free placement can give an advantage upon fixed one. Not that the fixed one is that bad, not a so big difference . Some articles somewhere (L19? SL?) where they used AI to clarify.
That’s quite a debate. The weaker benefits from a well placed frame although if he don’t know how to use it… The traditional way is based on influence as a well suited concept to practice, not as your own preferences. And who will benefits the most of all the books and such is far to be clear… Now if you never thought and played a free handicap placement you may penalize yourself from the very beginning, that’s true too.
Exactly. Start a blitz with Chinese handicap. May be a way to airbag 
(how long will he see we play with Chinese rules? Does he even know how it works?)
- Reasonable to assume people know them: no, but use them: yes, within limits
- Can learn … from context: hard here!
- Can look them up: fair enough, as long as there are not too many of them (which there were not here).
A lot of Go players are not video gamers.
3 Likes
Are you sure?
2 Likes
To be fair, when I look up “nerf”, I get none the wiser from the search results:
Don’t forget that ‘just looking it up’ is not that easy for many people (e.g. my parents).
6 Likes
Pretty much. I expect that a lot are, but I also feel sure that a lot are not. I did not say “not many Go players are video gamers”!
1 Like
Veering well off-topic, I rather dislike these Nerf weapons, which seem to me to encourage the idea of guns as toys.
I think most people in this forum are capable of looking this stuff up.
1 Like
You know i said this because i feel i know better a small atypical part of the go players as let say some young hikaru generation. And even in the atypical part i was sometimes surprised how many of us play(ed) video games
Capable of, yes, but I found that formulating a Google query in such a way that you get the right information is, surprisingly, a skill that needs to be developed. Just typing slightly wrong keywords can totally hide what you are searching for.
My usual tech advice to my parents is “have you googled it”, which they sometimes have done indeed. When I then google the same problem for them and the answer is the first search result, the usual response is “why does it always find the answer when you search, but not when I do?”
Or a concrete example, now that we’ve gone off-topic anyways; my mother had to fill in a BIC code for a bank a while ago, but didn’t know what that meant. Googling something like “what is BIC” brought her a page like this one that is totally relevant, but completely unhelpful in finding out what code you have to fill in. Meanwhile I’d find the result immediately by googling “BIC” + name of the bank
6 Likes
Actually, I search primarily with DuckDuckGo, which would be much more likely to return the same result for you and your parents! But I agree that searching is a skill, though I expect most on this forum are reasonable at it. Part of that skill is, of course, recognising the useful pages among the search results, or that a more specific search is needed. Speedy skimming and a feeling for language help there — but so does a technical background.
It is often a challenge to imagine oneself in the position of the person to whom one tries to explain something.
3 Likes
Indeed!
This is why I believe I’ve become worse at teaching mathematics understandably the more I’ve learnt. The easiest people to teach, are those that know just slightly less than you do.
4 Likes
Re explaining maths: a fellow-pupil did not accept that ·9̇(recurring†) = 1. I explained about limits, about having more than one representation of a number, about the difference being 0: nothing helped. But then he agreed that ·9̇ recurring = 3×·3̇ recurring = 3×⅓ = 1. He was happy; I was not, as I did not feel he had understood anything important! (Of course as a Go player one may also be aware of surreal and infinitesimal numbers…)
† My typeface here does not support combining Unicode dot or line above:(
7 Likes
Another way to nerf corners or buff sides/center is to play on larger boards, like 21x21 or 23x23.
7 Likes
Did you try this? Let x=0.99999…
Then 10x=9.999999…= 9 + 0.99999… = 9+x which simplifies as 9x=9, so x=1.
On the word “nerf”: I don’t play online video games and don’t want to. I used to play games several hours/day when I was a teenager, before online games existed, and know how addictive computer games can be.
5 Likes
I suppose in the background it’s also working on the same principles as 3(0.333…)=0.99999…
I don’t think the two approaches are fundamentally different, though maybe they have a different feel to them.
The way I’ve had success once, is to let the student try to show that they are different, and just keep asking questions about their “proof” until it’s clear where the misunderstanding was (in that case the meaning of “being equal to” was unclear, which allowed me to let them ‘discover’ on their own essentially what Cauchy sequences are).
2 Likes
Except that the student may wonder next why 0.333… = 1/3.
Also, the method I explained is more general. For instance, to express 0.123123123… as a fraction, let x=0.123123123… then 1000x=123+x so x= 123/999 = 41/333.
4 Likes