|
Go Online
A World of Game Records
March 3, 2003
By Roy Laird
Did you know that game records cannot be copyrighted? The matter has seldom if ever been litigated, but prominent legal theorists in the area of intellectual property consider it analogous to a recording of a historical event. For example, the President cannot copyright the State of the Union address. Also, since game records are the product of two competing creators, neither of whom can claim exclusive authorship, no one can copyright them.
Commentary, analysis, and diagrams of variations can be copyrighted by the author, and collections of games are also considered proprietary, but the records themselves immediately enter the public domain. Those interested in the fine points can find further discussion at Jared Roach's home page at
http://www.strategicgenomics.com/Jared/Go/.
Whatever the legality of the matter, the fact is that thousands of game records are available on the Internet. You should know that "bootleg" commented game records game collections may also appear on the Net, but to our knowledge none of the sites mentioned below contain illicit material. As far as we know, all the records noted below are in .sgf format.
Let's begin with a trip to Jon Van Rongen's "Friday Night Files" site at
http://www.xs4all.nl/~rongen17/. Van Rongen's site appears to be a Cho Chikun freak -- you will find over 1400 of Cho's games here. He is also especially interested in the career of an up-and-coming young Japanese pro named Yamashita Keigo, who developed skills at the Ryokusei Igo Gakuen Go Academy, which is well-known for its students' successes in recent years, and for having been founded by an amateur player.
An especially interesting feature of Van Rongen's site is a collection of game records from actual professional games that are used in the Hikaru No Go anime series. (Sidebar to those who enjoy the HNG fansubs but haven't looked lately: There are 62 episodes available now!)
GoBase, Jan Van der Steen's massive resource at http://www.gobase.org/, is another good place to harvest records. You can't download 1000+ records at a crack as you can at Van Rongen's site, but some of the records are sorted in interesting ways at
http://www.gobase.org/studying/gallery/?id=intro according to the type of game -- "Brilliant Moments" Big Kills" and so on. There are also about 100 commented games at
http://www.gobase.org/studying/analysed/, and a searchable database at
http://www.gobase.org/information/games/search/.
It is said that one of the best ways to learn is by studying professional games. For commented pro games, try Go Game World at
http://www.gogameworld.com/. There are also about 500 records from the Honinbo, Meijin and Tengen tournaments at
http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Flats/3603/gameindex.html. (Of course some pro game records appear on more than one of the sites listed above.) If you're interested in game records from specific tournaments, you'll want to visit "Momoyama's Go Scene" at
http://www.kyoto.zaq.ne.jp/momoyama/news/news.html. Momoyama has pages for all the major Japanese, Chinese, Korean and International tournaments, but you'll have to harvest the records one at a time.
Probably the ultimate resource for pro game records is MasterGo, the search-by-pattern program endorsed by Michael Redmond. The downloadable demo includes 800 pro games featuring the san-ren-sei (three star points) opening. Get it at
http://www.slateandshell.com/libraryprod.asp?SSKey=SSMG001. The registered version containing 17,000 records and counting. Owners of the full version receive free upgrades as more games are added to the database.
I know some of you like to look at amateur games as well. I've never understood that way of thinking -- I'd rather see good moves than learn why bad moves are wrong. If I want to see stupid moves, I'll just play a game myself! But the Go teaching Ladder at
http://gtl.jeudego.org/reviews/by_strength has many records from players of all strength, most with comments. Even better, if you want you can upload your own game records for review by a stronger player.
And last but not least -- in terms of price -- for those who believe that more is better, there is the BIGo Assistant. The authors claim a collection of 700,000 games records that fills an entire CD-ROM. Mostly amateur games, the cost is s whopping $200. Learn more at
http://www.ufgo.kar.net/BIgo/Downloads0E.htm. Caveat emptor.
So now that you've got all these records, what can you do with them? I went to the TurboGo home page and downloaded the Go Screensaver. (Click on "Go Screensaver" at
http://www.turbogo.com/) Put the records you like all in a directory and point the screen saver at that directory. When your computer is idle, your mind can be active as you watch each game progress, trying to guess the next move. It's the next best thing to studying while you sleep!
OOPS, I MISSED ONE: Readers who enjoyed looking at the Go art links in the "Go Online" column that appeared on 2/10 will also want to visit the Internet Go Server's extensive collection at
http://igs.joyjoy.net/English/gallery.html.
UPDATE: 3/31/2003
"It turns out that the research for my last column, 'A World of Game Records', was incomplete," reports Online Go columnist Roy Laird. "When I called the MasterGo database the ultimate source for professional games, I neglected to mention another contender for that sobriquet. GoGoD, a game database available from Yutopian Enterprises, contains over 20,000 pro games with identifying information, in sgf format for easy export to other applications. Learn more about it at
https://www.yutopian.com/yutop/cat?product=EAGOD&category=EGD Although these two programs contain large, and presumably similar, databases, they are different products. GoGoD's records are in sgf format, which makes them easy to export to other applications. MasterGo is more expensive, and offers the ability to search by pattern, but games cannot be exported to your Palm Pilot or your screen saver. The GoGod page is a bit confusing. Along with the product itself, you will find more than $400 worth of separate collections on offer; however, Yutopian informs us that all those collections are inlcuded in the basic database. I hadn't visited the Yutopian site in a while, and it seems to have expanded or reorganized lately.
Back to Columns |
|
