Wednesday, April 13, 2016

[hxyfuzsw] Kifu

A kifu of a go 囲碁 game is a very compact method of describing a game: all the stones played with a number on each stone.  It is a little bit unwieldy because one has to search for the next move, but that is the price of compactness.

It does require some annotations to side, e.g., dealing with captured stones.  What is the complete set of conventions for such annotations?  I think the first stone played at an intersection is given on the board; later stones are given as annotations.  There might be another one involving play which repeatedly captures and plays on the same spot: ko fights.

Incidentally, there is some ambiguity of exactly what "kifu" means.  It could mean the specific format of publishing a game (famously in newspapers) described above.  This is the meaning being used in this post.

It could also mean generically any game record, in any format, e.g., SGF is a type of kifu.  Or any presentation of a recorded game, e.g., Javascript game player playing out a specific game.

It could also mean specifically the handwritten game record done by the game recorder during a live game, analogous to scoresheets in chess.

Given only a kifu, provide commentary to the game, for example, especially good or bad moves.  This is a challenge intended only for high-level players, needing to mentally erase the stones that haven't been played yet (or have been captured), vaguely similar to blindfold chess or commentating just given a listing of chess moves.

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