new books

There was a big booksale on today, which I went to, and bought some books. But not as many as I thought I might.
My attitude to books has changed interestingly over the last few years.
Now that my reading list is longer than I can reasonably expect to ever get through, and there is so much reading material freely available, and other media that I want to absorb, it no longer seems worth just buying anything vaguely interesting looking. I've come to realise that the probability of actually reading the book, or being able to use it some other way (such as giving it away, or lending it out) is very important too.
So, this is what I came out with today, along with why:

• Collins Gem Weather - a guide to interpreting the sky, and what it's done, is doing, and is likely to do. This would be a nice skill to have, especially as I never watch the weather, and I like to cycle. I bought this book in order to increase my natural intepretive skills.
• The Tough Guide To Fantasy Land - This is basically a glossary of roleplaying terms and culture I think. I bought this book because it looks simple to read, reasonably entertaining, but mainly because it should give me a better understanding of role-playing, and hence one of my best friends. I bought this book in order to understand someone else.
• Nobody's Child - This is a book of Kate Adie's experiences of orphans. I have a lot of respect for Kate Adie, and I don't know much about orphans. I bought this book to learn more about Kate Adie, and through her, humanity.
• The Kindness of Children - The premise of this book is: 'Are children wiser about the nature of kindness than we think they are?' I don't think my society has the right attitude to children, hence books like this that challenge the social outlook seem likely to me to be good sources of truth and wisdom. I bought this book to learn more about humanity, and what humanity could be.
• The Christmas Mystery - Jostein Gaarder, writer of Sophie's World, writes well, thoughtfully and entertainingly. I haven't been reading enough fiction lately either, which has been tiring me out I think. Also, Sophie's World connects back to an important time in my past: reading this might reveal/grow some important links, and enable some sort of progression. I bought this book to relax with, and help set my life in better context.
• Salam Pax, The Baghdad Blog - A text that I'd like to have about me simply because I think it has historical importance: the emergence of independent internet journalism via blogging. Also, I expect there's some pretty interesting stuff in here concerning the situation in Iraq. I bought this book as a historical memento, and to flesh out my impression of the Iraq conflict.
• Teach Yourself PR - I bought this book because having a better working knowledge of PR should let me interact with PRed organisations more effectively. In a world where big organisations impact our lives a lot, this should be a useful skill.
• Tales From Earthsea - This was on my to buy list already: I read the first three Earthsea books already, and loved them, and they influenced me significantly. I bought this book to continue an ongoing thread of my life, be entertained and thought provoked. Ursula K Le Guin is an awesome writer and thinker. Anything she's written is on my reading list.
  
• Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance - I loved Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and I am involved with keeping chickens, so this seems like a nice book to have. I bought this book to see how I align with the rest of the chicken keeping community, and hopefully to get a better feeling for the relationship between humans and other animals.
• Sufi - Family friends raised Sufism in my consciousness recently, and got me interested. I know next to nothing about Sufism, so I bought this book to increase my awareness of humanity, and its customs.

So there we are. A whole bunch of books, motives, and future reading for me...

Tagging

Tagging is a very common feature in various database type applications nowadays. It's very tempting to try and use it as a hierarchical or disjoint categorisation tool, but this is obviously flawed! I have tried to use tags as such, but it doesn't work well, and breaks the real idea of what tagging is about.
Tagging is supposed to be haphazard and instinctive. If you scatter many tags everywhere, and use the tags, you will naturally settle into a vocabulary that unlocks a lot of extra information from your database, whether you're using a personal or a social tagging system.
A small number of well chosen tags that has the effect of causing a hierarchy or a disjoint categorisation reduces your flexibility in choosing tag names in the future, and makes things needlessly constrained.
As concerns social categorising systems, maybe we need parallel systems: tagging, hierarchies, sets and more. The more ways we have to link up data, the more useful it is I would say!

A Go Game

What sort of game do I want? I see the beginning of the Go game as a conversation, where I decide with my partner what sort of game I want to play.
Do we want to play a standoffish game of opaque strategy, do we want to have a singleminded scrap across the whole board. Do we want to play similar styles, or pit different styles against each other? Do we want to cooperate, or argue? Do we want to experiment with new ideas, refine developing skills, or exercise prior knowledge? What combination of these things do we want to do?

So, the opening is like a statement of policy. After that, the outward aim of the game is to see whose policy works the best. Go's excellent handicapping property (it's too basic and intrinsic to be called a rule) is such that the strength of the players should only be a factor in the choice of policy, not a decider of the outcome of the game. (Unless the strength gap is too great, in which case teaching games are more appropriate.)
Go helps you realise your own strength, not waste it, and not have a false impression of it. If you adopt policies that you don't have the strength to follow up, you lose. But if you adopt policies that you easily have the strength to follow up, if the handicap was set correctly, you will lose because you wasted your stones.

If your strategies turn out to be ineffective, you have to find the agility to move onto effective strategies. Go is full of balances like this.

Maybe I will play an inflexible strategy in the hope that it is one my opponent doesn't know and will lose to. Maybe I will try and play as flexibly as possible, partly to hide my lack of a plan, and partly to be ready for unexpected events. Good go is a combination of all these things. And the size of the goban means you can adopt a varying mix of these in different places on the board.

So by the midgame the strategies are decided, there is no more room to change them (barring swindles). It is up to both players to follow through with the promises they made at the beginning. If they don't, they lose.

If the handicap was right, and both players made good choices, the result may be a draw. The endgame is an opportunity to avoid a draw by making up points in the last little fights over small amounts of remaining territory.

So perhaps one view of Go is this. The opening is a gamble. Do you have the skill to pull off the strategy you want to use in order to win? Do you want to win on the strategy, or rely on using superior strength to take a big swing in the midgame, or do you want to make it a close game and take the win with little points in the endgame?
Because stones are played in turns, both players base their decisions on the intentions the other communicates through their stones.
Once the bets have been made, they have to be tested. As the game progresses there is less and less opportunity to change your bets, and you are forced to follow them through.
By the endgame, both players are scraping up the last points, either to emphasize or blunt a victory, or to snatch one.
Gamble, prove, scrape.

An ideal game of Go is a draw: both players chose appropriate strategies for their skills, the handicap was correct, and neither could break the others choices. Because the skill of individuals varies widely and according to context, and because the available strategies and tactics in Go are so great, this means that in reality the game may not always be a draw. A well balanced game that isn't a draw and where no mistakes were made represents both players exploring new territory. A well balanced, flawless game that is a draw represents both players practicing on charted territory.

A good Go player works a balance between practice and exploration. In a full-size game there is often opportunity to do both.

Go has very much depth!

Bearing all that in mind, playing Go against a computer is quite strange, especially when it's better than you! It's as if the computer is beating me at a Turing test.
Once you've gotten over the weirdness of taking a game against a computer seriously enough to play properly, the fact that it's actually better than you is quite interesting. (Remember that number crunching is not a big item in the armoury of a Go player). Perhaps this is the one way in which a computer can actually teach me (albeit only for the beginning stages), rather than merely being a portal through which I view information.