In today’s Samsung Cup I noticed that Ichiriki Ryo played white pieces with the board facing him the way a real board would.
If you tense your eyes a little, you see black first move in bottom-left, and all other moves are rotated 180 degrees compared to the game records.
I got interested, I pulled up Nongshim Cup, look, the board is rotated for white.
This is now the only true way to play.
It works fine against AI if that’s what you want, but it makes kibtzing and reviews a lot harder as you need to always use coordinates rather than top left, etc.
Tradition is good and well, but if you find yourself in a strategical and existential crisis everytime you play white and black’s first stone is not in the lower left corner 
from your point of view, then maybe you need to work on your own mindset.
Why? Just use the same coordinates, but flipped if you watch white’s perspective. Rotate the coordinates along with the board.
If someone refers to the upper-right corner, will other people know which corner they refer to?
We have AI that can beat humans at Go, surely we can make one that scans our text and rotates it accordingly 
I think you misunderstood me. Yes, coordinates still work as we both said, what doesn’t work is referring to general areas such as “left side” as these will all be flipped
haha Can you imagine the confusion?
“Cutting there was a bit under the bottom.”
“I should’ve played g6, but that’s water over the bridge.”
“c4 looks like the left move, over the given circumstances.”
That’s why we don’t let GnuGo do the translation. We need some Kata-level text rotation.
in how many languages?
I’m assuming we’d start in python, that’s what all the AI people use, right?
Regardless of the two players being shown different views, we typically assign the canonical perspective of a game as that matching black’s. Even with physical, over-the-board games, where the players are sitting on opposite sides, the view that is shown to the audience, and used for commentary and game recording typically matches what black naturally sees. In such commentary, kibitz, etc., people often do casually say “top”, “bottom”, “left”, “right”, since it is often that all of the spectators are viewing the same black perspective. Often only the player in the seat for white sees it differently, but that is less of an issue, since they cannot be part of the discussion, of course.
For people that commonly play over a physical board, one might actually become accustomed to that perspective, so much so that common fuseki that one prefers are better visualized in that orientation. For a lot of people transitioning from physical games to virtual ones in these particular times, maybe it is enough of an issue for some to make this accommodation.
This very thing twisted my melon for a long time after moving to online play after only ever playing on real boards.
I would love if we could also have generic thing that translates ‘left’ to ‘right’ and ‘top’ to ‘bottom’, and vice versa. It could create gems such as “i’m not sure if this joseki is left” and “my top sure is sore after last night”
Well, since pros play like this, we gotta just do it too.
Go was recently added to play strategy https://playstrategy.org (though they are recently working out some ko rule bugs) and as a lichess fork, it has the ability to rotate the board for white, as well as the coordinates 
I don’t think it makes that much of a difference to me, but I suppose if people want to experience it, there’s one place to try it.
Maybe if it’s very enjoyable/requested it could be worth implementing on OGS at some stage.
