Kifu

Kifu (棋譜) is the Japanese term for a game record for a game of Go or shogi. Kifu is traditionally used to record games on a grid diagram, marking the plays on the points by numbers.

This term is originally from China. In China, people named this kind of record "qipu" (simplified Chinese: 棋谱; traditional Chinese: 棋譜; pinyin: qípǔ). The earliest surviving kifu are collected by the book Wangyou Qingle Ji (Chinese: 忘憂清樂集; literally: "Forget Worry Pure Happy Collection"), written by Li Yimin (Chinese: 李逸民) around 1100 AD (Song dynasty).

A large corpus — many thousands of games — of kifu records from the Edo period has survived. Quite a low proportion was published in book form; strong players used to make their own copies by hand of games to study. This accounts for one feature of the records passed down: they often omit much of the 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.

The early Western Go players found the method of kifu inconvenient, probably because as chess players they were more familiar with 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.

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