Learn How to Run a Tournament: Steve Colburn is well-known as a key member of the E-Journal’s Congress team and as the AGA’s sysadmin extraordinaire, but he’s also the chapter head of the Empty Sky Go Club in Rochester, NY. Colburn has now released a few videos on how to administer an AGA chapter, including how to run a tournament with OpenGotha, and how to update a chapter’s details with the AGA Membership Manager. Click here for his videos. Questions about how to update your information, sign up, or use the AGA website? Send them to operations@usgo.org and we’ll make more tutorial videos with your questions.
Cotsen’s New Facebook Page: The Cotsen Open has a new Facebook page. “Like” it and you’ll be the first to hear announcements when the 2015 Cotsen is scheduled as well as updates throughout the year.
Using Go to Study Culture: Bret Beheim, a Post Doctoral Fellow in the Anthropology Department at the University of New Mexico proposes go as “a model system in the study of cultural evolution” in “Strategic Social Learning and Evolutionary Arms Races in the Game of Go,” a Nov. 20, 2012 presentation of a paper he co-authored with Calvin Thigpen and Richard McElreath. The paper, drawing from “a large archive of Go games spanning the last six decades of professional play,” finds “evidence that changes in the frequencies of particular cultural variants are driven by social learning mechanisms such as frequency-dependence and success bias.”
EJ Copy Editor Wanted: With an increasing number of go news reports from around the world, the E-Journal has an opening for a volunteer copy editor. If interested, email journal@usgo.org