A Go game record is an archival record for a game of Go. Kifu (棋譜) is the Japanese term for abstract strategy game record. In China, people named this kind of record "qipu" (. In Korea, people named this kind of record "Gibo" (). Go records are traditionally used to record games on a grid diagram representing the playing board, marking the plays on the stones by numbers. Stones placed before play begins are unnumbered. History The earliest surviving Go game records are collected in the book Wangyou Qingle Ji (), written by Li Yimin () around 1100 AD (Song dynasty). A large 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 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 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 numerals 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. Use The playing-through on a Go board of a game record given as a kifu on a single diagram is still a little taxing for a beginner player,