From: DANERUD MARTIN TELIA COM> Date: 17 dec 2002 Subject: Re: "art" Dear all, > This is such a complex question! Thanks for the interesting discussion. I think everything gets more complex as soon as you want to define shogi (or chess) as something else than a sport. Of course it is a sport. But at the same time, shogi as well as chess have artistic and scientific values. The same phenomena as those described by Ito-san also exist in other sports. Sports are measurable. There can be enough statistics to keep a lot of persons busy. There are winners, goal scorers, and champions. However, there are also undeniable artistic values, which are not measured so easily. Sometimes there is also some luck behind the statistics. If you describe the World Cup of football 2002 as 1. Brazil 2. Germany 3. Turkey that does not tell anything about the tough match Brazil had against Belgium. That does not tell anything about the free kick with which Anders Svensson scored for Sweden against Argentina or any other artistic values of the tournament. The results of World Cup tournaments through history do not tell anything about the artistic experience that the 1982 Brazil team left in the hearts of football lovers (goals by Zico (4), Falcao (3), Eder (2), Socrates (2), Junior, Oscar, Serginho, and Serinho), even though they were knocked out by Italy in their last match. So, if you start by letting shogi be the sport it is, then we can continue to discuss how to rate it and how beautiful it is, in the same way that we can do with any sport. Among the most beautiful things of sports at lower levels are the enthusiasm and dreams of organisers, first-round losers and other players in the lower halves of the result lists, those in the basis of the pyramid who make it meaningful for anyone to be an amateur 5-dan player. Compared to the professional games, there is not so much beauty without mistakes on the boards. Thus let us share that enthusiasm together. Best regards, Martin Danerud FESA president