Memorizing (old) pro games

Guo Juan asked Rich and I to memorize Nie Weiping's China-Japan Supergo Match games from the 1980's. Here's the beginning of the third game we're memorizing.

Nie Weiping played white against Kato Masao on June 12, 1982. Kato won by 7.5.

The style of professional play has really changed over the past 20 years with the rise of Korea on the Go scene. The classy style exhibited here is typical of that time and generally associated with the Japanese who, for a long time, held the undisputed distinction of being the best in the world. China had a resurgence and started challenging the Japanese and then Korea, led by the revolutionary Lee ChangHo, started to dominate the world Go scene. The current style of professional play, generally associated with the Koreans, is marked by very complicated fighting, starting early in the game. Lately, China has been winning many of the international title matches.

I've been daydreaming about someday opening a Go cafe. It would be a beautiful and comfortable place where people would want to spend their time, regardless of whether they are playing Go. The cafe would finance the space enough that Go players could afford to regularly play in an appropriate setting. The equipment would be of good quality, we'd have a resident professional (I'm thinking Zhang Pei Pei would be perfect), we'd hold regular classes, both beginners' and advanced and we'd have our professional regularly lecture on the latest big professional games. I'd of course need some big sponsors; who will finance my little dream?

Ni hao!

I had my first Chinese class tonight. We did numbers and some basic greetings, as well as some discussion of tones. None of what we did tonight was new to me, but it's definitely much faster than learning from a cd, so I'm sure we'll get there quickly. I feel like I have access to secret knowledge though--stuff that you'd never learn unless you actually went to China and spent some time with Chinese people. Tonight, for example, we learned how to count, but we were not taught the hand symbols one uses for the numbers six through ten. In Chinese, you can count to nine with just one hand (ten uses the forefinger from each hand).

Apparently I missed more than a simple housewarming this weekend. Kevin and Linda and both of my sisters (liang ge meimei) went to a blimp inflation at one of their neighbor's. I had heard about this blimp before, but these photos (courtesy of Kevin) are stunning. I was only going to put a couple of them up here, but the sequence really tells a whole story, and quite a magical one at that.







I haven't heard any report about the Guo Juan workshop at the Woodlands yet, and I imagine I'll never hear what happened at the MGA tournament, which also took place this weekend. Walther and I waited in vain all summer for someone (anyone!) to tell us about the summer tournament. Even the Upper Valley Go Club, which I thought for sure I could count on, failed to send a report. I think the MGA is the only AGA club that doesn't put little blurbs into the AGA E-journal about tournament results. I guess I should be careful though, because I no longer get the member's edition of the E-journal, so maybe I'm just not getting the right issues.

Perks

I've received two packages from Kate already and I just got a care package from Jess today! I guess there are some perks to living in a dorm.

I think my tutorial last week went well. I told the students that I'm American, and they were going to have to put up with my American ideas of teaching: I'm forcing them to participate. There's not too much leeway for creative teaching in a tutorial, but I had them put solutions to the problems on the board. Most people just copied furiously, but I had a couple of people ask questions and I even got some people to volunteer to come up to the board. Though you have to push them to participate, I think they enjoy it.

We'll see if anyone comes back this week.

A few of us in my office have agreed that the place needs to be livened up a bit. So we actually chat with each other a bit now (as opposed to sitting in absolute silence and barely acknowleding the existence of each other) and are trying to find time to go out for a beer. Mathematicians' stereotypical social awkwardness and the natural reticence of the Queen's subjects makes for a deadly combination, but I think we're making progress.

Too Slow

I'm much too slow. Last night, at the Nippon Club, I decided to play on the clock to try to speed up my play. We played with half of an hour each; no overtime because they only have those analog clocks that don't have a convenient way to do byo yomi. I just played the same as usual though, and lost three games on time, rather than playing one game that I get to actually finish. I need to actually make an effort to play faster, not just put the game on the clock so that it ends sooner. It's so hard though, especially when I'm as tired as I was last night. Hopefully today will be better.

It looks like I'm finally on my way to getting a bank account (though I'm not quite there yet). After applying online with HSBC for an international student account (which means I pay them a monthly fee in exchange for the absolute barest minimum of a contract that might be construed as a bank account), I got some information from them in the mail, which, according to instructions, I took back to the bank. Suddenly (after all the previous difficulty), I was able to provide sufficient proof of my existence with just my passport and a letter from the department which states my U.S. address and my U.K. address. The funny part is that the school has absolutely no proof whatsoever of my address; they just have on record whatever I tell them. Anyway, it doesn't have to make sense as long as I have an account so that I can get paid. I don't yet--they just made photocopies of my passport and took the letter from the school and said that they should give me an account soon. In the letter I got in the mail, the first sentence said, "You're nearly there." Clearly, I'm not the only one who has to jump through fiery hoops to get a bank account here.