Hello, Ms. Suzuki. I am very fond of life-and-death problems and I study them every day. Recently I’ve been wondering how you and other professionals go about composing life-and-death problems. I would be grateful if you could tell me, in concrete terms. Question by Mr. Sasaguchi Hello, Mr. Sasaguchi. Thank you for your question. I admire you for studying life-and-death problems every day. In my case, there are three main ways I compose problems. 1. I take positions from my own games or games I’ve played through and change and revise them to make them into problems. 2. I take stones from the go bowls and just scatter them on the board. I then rearrange them to make problems. 3. I take sequences that have occurred to me while playing and make a shape in which this sequence becomes the right answer. I should mention that the second method is quite difficult and requires a certain amount of skill. The same applies to the third method: it’s sometimes difficult to recreate the sequence or there are other moves that become the correct answer. In short, I compose the overwhelming majority of my problems by the first method, so this is the one I recommend. You’re also more likely to come up with problems that are relevant to actual play. Life-and-death problems are evaluated on their difficulty (the brilliance of the technique involved and the naturalness of the shape). I wish you the best of luck in your own efforts.