Classification of Plays: Ideal, Good,...

[Dave Sigaty]

There is a key idea missing in the available choices - "depends on context". Many plays, even quite basic ones (e.g. 3-3 invasion under a 4-4 stone), depend on the surrounding position. A 3-3 invasion by White as the second play in a game (following B1 on 4-4), is a bad play. The same play when Black has made a low extension on either side of a 4-4 stone is often ideal. What is a good one-word description that will readily convey this idea?

[adum]

hi dave, this is a good point. it would be nice to have a better mechanism for this, but the 'Good' classification is probably the best at the moment, combined with a textual description of why the move isn't ideal but may be a good choice depending on the circumstances. a 'Bad' move is always going to be the wrong choice, but a 'Good' move may be the right choice in a specific situation.

[Dave Sigaty]

I still think a separate word is necessary. If we are limited to the existing words, is the 3-3 invasion under the 4-4 stone to be marked "Bad"? In the absence of surrounding stones that may be the most appropriate. However, it certainly does not tell the whole story! When I wrote the first suggestion all that popped into my mind for a new term was "Contextual" but I thought that the meaning would not be so easy to understand immediately. How about "Situational"?

[adum]

this is interesting. i think it's possible to say that all joseki are contextual, in reality. a joseki that result in influence for one player on one side is only an even result if that influence is useful (and conversely, not too useful). so restricting Ideal moves to josekis without context doesn't really make sense either.

[mafutrct]

I agree with the OP. Some moves completely depend on the environment - they can be very good or very bad. That is different from many joseki that are more or less independant from the rest of the board. The proposed words sound fine to me and I recommend their use.

[anpanna]

How about using 4 rather than 3 classes:
- (almost) always good
- usually good, but context dependend
- usually bad, but context dependent
- (almost) always bad

Some moves are just plain mistakes, because something really horrible happens in the local fight, and some just lose a few points of Yose and may be correct depending on the surrounding. It would be nice to distinguish between them.

[dracula]

I don't know that adding new semantic classifications for this is really that useful, personnally. Joseki, I.E. "locally equitable" or "locally ideal" sequences, cannot be seen as context independent in the first place, and then the choice of a non-joseki variation is always going to be highly sensitive to the global position, whether it's considered normally a "good" but non-joseki sequence or normally a blunder. The biggest issue in my opinion is gettting good commentary associated with the positions. Semantic labelling can get arbitrarily sophisticated, but will always be limited by the underlying science (game theory, semantics itself, etc.), and finer grain is not always a good thing.