How Many Squares are there on a Go Board?

Kami Kaze: How many squares are there on a go board? Go away and think about it for a while and then come back and we will discuss it!

20 kyu player: 361 of course.
Kami Kaze: Wrong...

10 kyu player: No silly, that's the number of vertices. There are 18x18 or 324 squares.
Kami Kaze: Wrong...


(A pause follows, but frantic calculations occur.)

1 dan player: Aha, there are also squares 2x2 and 3x3 and so on, which means that the total is 18x18 + 17x17 and so on making a grand total of 2109!
Crowd: Aaaahh very clever!
Kami Kaze: But wrong...

3 dan player: You've forgotten that they aren't squares, they are rectangles. There are no squares on a go board!
Crowd: That's a dirty trick.
Kami Kaze: And still wrong...

(Another pause, and many puzzled faces.)

Crowd: Well how many squares are there on a go board then?

Kami Kaze: It is perfectly true that the smaller areas are rectangles, and each of these is one twelth longer than it is wide. Therefore, if we take an area twelve rectangles long and thirteen wide, we have a large square, and this is the only size which works. There are (19-12 ) x (19-13) or 42 such squares. The answer is forty-two.

Douglas Adams: We all knew the answer, it's the question that we didn't know. Thank you Kami Kaze, the whole question of the meaning of Life, The Universe and Everything is simply "How many squares are there on a go board?"

Marvin: I tried to tell them, but you know what humans are like, they have the attention span of a dead gnat. Here I am with a brain the size of a planet, and having worked out all the possible games of go, the meaning of life is to have two eyes except in seki when ......

Crowd: Which restaurant shall we eat at tonight?

(The crowd departs leaving Marvin talking to himself.)

Marvin: I can tell you what the strictly correct komi is if you really want to know? Oh never mind me, just carry on. I haven't got any feelings of course .....

(From Sensei's Library)

Windows Installer for SRM 7.6

I am just about to upgrade our BMC Service Request Management 2.2 patch 4 to SRM 7.6 patch 1. It should be a straight forward upgrade. I will install everything on the D-drive and I've deleted stuff so I have at least 2 GB free space. On the C-drive we have only the Windows operating system and we are not allowed to install anything else on the C-drive.

I start the installation but it halts before the actual installation starts with a message that I need to free up space on the C-drive for temporary 1500 MB data and it is only 1376 MB space available.

WTF! I have nothing to free up on the C-drive. Can't I use some network drive for temporary storage during the installation? Or use the 8GB memory that is mostly unused at the moment? Quite often I wish we were using Unix/Linux instead of this toy-OS called Windows.

See you later... now I have to call some Windows-tech to help me expand the C-drive or whatever they do.

Swedish Championship 2010

It is time for the Swedish Championship 2010. More precisely the games will be played 14-16 May.

This year it will be played in Norrköping southeast of Stockholm. It is the first time that the Championship is played in Norrköping and the proud organizers are so far doing an impressive job. It will be interesting to see how well they will deliver when all the players arrive.

There have been a lot of discussion of how to make the championship more interesting. So for the first time we are trying out a system that makes the 16 strongest Swedish citizens  play a knock-out. All the weaker players and the players without Swedish citizenship (like Girlwing) are playing a regular six rounds McMahon. After each round, the players who lost their game of the top 16 will be paired in with the rest in the open McMahon tournament. When only the two strongest players are left, they will play a best of three, so the first one of them with two wins will be the new Swedish Champion.

I and Girlwing are planning to attend so I really wish we both can go. Sometimes work is stealing our weekends but let's hope it will not do this time. So we'll see you in Norrköping!

If you have any questions you can discuss it in our forum.