Why is there no "I" on the board

It goes A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,J. What’s the deal? just curious.

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Usually done that way to avoid confusion with lower case L or 1 I think.

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When the original creator of Go discovered the inherent beauty and complexity of what he had wrought, he took a solemn vowel to give thanks to the Gods.

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The latin alphabet had no letter J. :man_shrugging:

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I think the letter I is usually skipped just to avoid potential confusion and transcription errors.

This convention seems to be followed in most places that use the “A1” coordinate system (borrowed from chess). However, a notable exception was seen in the broadcast of one of the most famous series of games:

In AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol match, the official live commentary is performed by Michael Redmond using a large magnetic wall goban that has the letter I in the coordinates. His board also has “A1” in the top-right instead of the bottom-left.

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This question has been asked many times. The best answer is as @AdamR said above—depending on font, it can look like i or 1 or l.

https://reddit.com/r/baduk/comments/4femom/why_does_board_notation_skip_the_letter_i/
https://reddit.com/r/baduk/comments/6g7lj6/why_do_most_digital_goban_coordinates_skip_the/
https://reddit.com/r/baduk/comments/dmmy7d/why_is_the_letter_i_not_used_to_label_coordinates/

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Perhaps this could be added to the FAQ?

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DON’T BELIEVE THE LIES

THE I EXISTS!

truth1

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#IlluminatiConfirmed

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And that is why there is no “I”. Because the Eye must always remain hidden :scream:. But like a hidden Excel column, the Eye is always hidden in plain sight :face_with_monocle:

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My vote goes to flovo. I believe the issue is with ‘i’ and ‘j’. I have a vinyl board similar to this one where it is in fact the jay that is omitted:

VinylGoBoard

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And what about the k?

Interesting that it also uses letters to mark the rows instead of the columns.

Nick Sibicky uses a magnetic display board with letters marking the rows, however, that’s only because it is a modified board that originally had Chinese characters marking the rows (see earlier vs later videos from him).

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The k was seldom used in latin but accepted as a letter in its own right. It survived in some very old abbreviations and personal names like Kaeso.
The J however was only a graphical variant of I up to the 20th century; at least in the german speaking world Oskar Korschelt grew up in. I know people whose last name is Imfeld, but they write Jmfeld.

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@Sanonius,
I’m German, and our handwritten “I” looks quite like a “J”, but sits on the base line (3rd line), while our handwritten “J” goes below the base line and has a loop:
image

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Ich weiss, in der Schweiz schreiben wir auch so :wink: and nowadays the J is a fully independent letter, of course.

But Fraktur and early Antiqua fonts don’t do the difference, as also the german wikipedia claims to know: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/J

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The tradition of I-omission is at least fifty years old.

From BGJ #14 (1971), pg. 12, British Championship Final (John Diamond):

I apologise for the algebraic notation, which is necessitated by the incomplete development of our revolutionary new diagramming process. The letter ‘I’ is left out, so that the letters ‘A’ to ‘T’ refer to columns of the board from left to right, and the numbers ‘1’ to ‘19’ to rows from bottom to top.

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I always thought that the alphanumeric system was inspired from chess, so it might be even older than that. Ever notice how there is no “I” on a chessboard either :thinking:

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I know what really happened.
Someone had a surrounded side group with one EYE that was on the I line and claimed that this way they had two eyes and the opponent said “aye aye” and punched the other player in the eye who exclaimed “aiaiaiai”, thus reducing the eyes to one, but the aiaiaiai counts as four eyes, causing more confusion.

Everything got complicated that day and people agreed that “I” should go, and that the I issue was not something to die over. So they dyed the I to look like a J and everyone turned a blind eye to the one person with “Oh see Dee” that saw that a missing I is bad for the mental eye and raised a complaining cry about the I, that really turned the eye.

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:rofl: