Editing Go game record (section)

==History==
{{More citations needed section|talk=y|date=September 2020}}
The earliest surviving Go game records are collected in the book ''Wangyou Qingle Ji'' ({{zh|l=''Forget Worry Pure Happy Collection''|t=忘憂清樂集}}), written by Li Yimin ({{zh|t=李逸民}}) around 1100 AD ([[Song dynasty]]).

[[Image:China go1.png|thumb|A recording of [[Wang Jixin]]'s game v. Yushan Laoyu (Ancient China, [[Tang dynasty]]). Expand for a clearer view. Note that the moves are numbered consecutively. At the time, the four unmarked moves were pre-played in a position known as a Cross Game.]]

A large [[text corpus|corpus]] – many thousands of games – of kifu records from the [[Edo period]] have survived. A small proportion were published in book form; strong players used to make their own copies of games by hand to study. This accounts for one feature of the records passed down: they often omit much of the [[List of Go terms#Yose|endgame]], since for a strong player reconstructing the smaller endgame plays is routine. This explains the survival of some games in different versions and possible discrepancies in the final margin.

Early Western Go players found the method of kifu inconvenient, probably because as chess players they were more familiar with [[Algebraic notation (chess)|algebraic notation]] and because as new players they found it difficult to locate moves. But they quickly discovered the advantages of kifu-style notation—as much as an entire game can be visually displayed in one diagram—and now virtually all Go books and magazines use some modification of the kifu to display games, variations and problems. While a typical piece of chess literature is in algebraic notation punctuated by occasional diagrams, Go literature mostly consists of diagrams with a sequence of plays marked, and prose commentary.

The pioneering European player [[Oskar Korschelt]] disliked kifus because nineteenth century kifus always used [[Chinese numerals]], which are indeed difficult to read unless one is familiar with them. Numbering in that style continued until 1945, having been popular in the 1930s on the basis of nationalist feeling in Japan. ([[Hindu–Arabic numeral system|Hindu–Arabic numeral]]s were also used.) In Japanese Go books, when unoccupied points of the board are mentioned in the commentary, they are usually labelled by [[hiragana]] (in [[iroha]] order) to this day.