What this website does:
Dailyjoseki.com teaches you joseki in the context of pro games in a way that optimizes your memorization. It also provides a browsable joseki tree as a free service to the go playing community.
How to use dailyjoseki.com:
A little more detail about taking tests:
Q: What's the queue page do?
A: There are two parts to the queue. Current study items are the example positions you'll see in your studies at the moment. Upcoming study items are sequences that are in your queue but haven't been shown to you yet.
Q: What are those partially transparent stones on the browse page?
A: The partially transparent stones answer the question, "What does the rest of the board look like when pros play into this position?" Stones which are more opaque indicate that it's more common for pro games to have a stone there; stones which are mostly black or mostly white show the relative frequency of having a black or white stone there.
More detail: the browse page shows the joseki tree, automatically generated from professional games. For each position, all pro games containing the position are virtually rotated, mirrored, and color-swapped so that they line up exactly. Then, they are averaged together, and the resulting partially transparent stones are shown on the board.
Q: How is it able to do a good job of teaching joseki?
A: Dailyjoseki.com uses a spaced repetition learning system to maximize the knowledge you gain from each viewing of a test position. Technically speaking, it is based off of the algorithms first used in SuperMemo and later in Anki, with a few adjustments for the specific application of go sequences. Another major difference from those programs is that dailyjoseki.com automatically generates the study material, which saves you a lot of time.
Q: Isn't rote memorization of joseki a bad thing?
A: A few points:
Q: Where did you get all the games?
A: The great people at GoGoD have kindly given me permission to use their collection as the basis for the joseki tree and test positions.
Q: Does this system actually help people win games?
A: The website is too new to have hard data yet. My own subjective opinion is that it definitely helps; when I'm using it regularly, I tend to try and play the josekis in my games, which often leads to interesting positions I would not have gotten into otherwise. And whether or not it turns out like I expected, knowing what a reasonable result in the position looks like is a great boon to reading things out and judging the resulting positions.
Q: How does it decide which positions to give you as tests?
A: When you select a position to learn, dailyjoseki.com finds pro games which contain it. It selects up to 100 games, divides them into groups based on how common the next few moves are, and adds each group to your queue. Every other day, you'll get a new position from each group in your queue. The system is designed to show you the most common variations as rapidly as possible, and, if possible for the position, not to give you a bunch of examples of the exact same thing.
Q: What does upgrading my account get me?
A: Upgrading your account removes the limit on your queue and the limit on how much studying you can do per day. It also will remove the limit on the secret feature I have planned, and anything else I might add in the future. I'm likely to pay more attention to bug reports and feature requests from subscribers. It also helps support the site: I'm not planning on getting rich with this, but I'm hoping it will at least pay for itself!
Q: Is dailyjoseki.com actually a prescription drug?
A: Addicting—possibly. Drug—no.
Q: When studying, sometimes after the main joseki another 50 moves or so will appear on the board and I will be asked to play the correct move in the new position.
Is this still considered 'joseki'? What is purpose of this? It is unlikely that any of my games will progress like the one the one in the test.
A: The idea is that you learn the common follow-ups after the joseki is complete, so you know how pros later defend or exploit a position, and get a feel for when it's good to do that.
For example, in this position white commonly later plays a defensive follow-up, which I learned about while testing the system:
I don't think you can call the follow-up moves part of the joseki, but they are important-- I think you probably don't have a good understanding of a position if you don't have some idea of what, locally speaking, to do next.
Sometimes the system stops too soon or too late (it stops when no three games include the same next move). For those times, use the "adjust" button to make the test longer or shorter.
Q: What are the specific limitations on studying using a free account?
A: With a free account, you may not: