When I was a kyu player, I avoided memorization. (Not that I took it up as a dan player. ) That was perhaps a mistake. I did not memorize joseki, because I did not study joseki. The only life and death problems I studied were in the Maeda series. Because there were not very many at my level, it was easy for me, when reviewing, to remember the answers without reading. Therefore I waited months between reviews, to give me time to forget. Perhaps it would have been better for me to drill them into memory, I don't know.
I think that the method of loci would be good for checklists. Acronyms also help. I still remember a checklist for the first play at contract bridge, devised by the great player, Oswald Jacoby. The acronym is ARCH. Analyze the opening lead. Review the bidding. Count tricks. How can the contract be made (or defeated)?
You may be interested in a book by Frances Yates, The Art of Memory. She discusses memory techniques from the early modern era and earlier, including the method of loci. It is a history book, not a how-to book.
One thing you can do if order is not important is to create an image in which different aspects of the image have meaning. For instance, armor might mean thickness, or a glove might mean honte. A severed limb might mean sacrifice.
Not that I use any of this in go or in life. The only memory technique I use is acronyms. But everybody is different. If you think that memory techniques might help you, try them out.
The Adkins Principle: At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins
I watched a bit of this, but to be honest I think it would be easier (for me at any rate) to remember the purpose and meaning of each move rather than some quirky story about mothers, knights and teenagers. (And actually I did try something similar a long time ago - I called various sequences after characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I ended up forgetting them all!)
Very cute avatar, btw, PeterPeter!
I could not make it through the story. I left them on the dance floor.
Not that the story might not be a help. (I suspect that they could have made a better presentation.)
The Adkins Principle: At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins
Bill Spight wrote:You may be interested in a book by Frances Yates, The Art of Memory. She discusses memory techniques from the early modern era and earlier, including the method of loci. It is a history book, not a how-to book.
I'm reading Moonwalking with Einstein by journalist Joshua Foer, a possibly similar book - also about memory techniques and how memory works, and covers, among other things, his efforts to train for and compete at the USA competitive memory championship. It isn't very specific about methods but it's pretty interesting and well worth a read, assuming you like your books light and entertaining rather than very heavy going. He references the Yates book you mentioned quite a few times.
I have wanted to do this for a while, and I think it is a worthy experiment, though not a guaranteed success.
I've always liked remembering things, in the sense of having them memorized, particularly phone numbers, for their obvious utility, and poetry, for it's beauty and for something to recite while driving, swimming or doing the dishes. I didn't get at all systematic about it until last year when I read "Moonwalking with Einstein," a heck of a good read. Anyway, inspired by it, I tried a half dozen thing and the two that stuck were my own version of the major system for phone numbers, and a sort of memory palace thing for poetry. The former is easy and has worked well. The latter was a little more labored to start (for instance, the image for "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day" contained among other things a dog, some chocolate chips, a strumpet and the Dey of Algiers heading off in a huff) but worked even better and got much easier. Images that are vivid, funny, sense-driven or raunchy and are wholly unconnected with the meaning of the text being memorized work much better. Oddly, images that relate to the text make things harder. It sounds like a complete waste of effort, but it really makes remembering stuff easy and methodical. Kubla Khan, the last one I memorized probably took me an hour or two to lever into my skull and it will be there forever.
Anyway, I tried to think up something that would work for joseki and it didn't really gel. I have been meaning to get back to it. (Yall might be aware that I've been increasingly preoccupied lately.) I think this fellow's approach with the major system is a good one and will probably work for a hundred or two patterns ... 10,000 would be difficult not merely because it's a lot but because the fixed meanings of points mean you will start to run out of plot lines. There's only so many things mom and that knight can get up to. I may try it, but I will do my own version for a few reasons. One is that I changed the Major system around a bit for my phone number thing and I don't want to have two Major systems in my head. Another is, I think it works better if you do your own creative thing. Lastly, well ... mom and the knight. I think the fellow in the videos made a slight tactical error in putting his mom in for the 3-3 point. Bad idea to put family members in memory systems. Especially mom. True, family members are extraordinarily vivid, but so are sex acts and violence. Folks who put family members in their "person-action-object" systems, for instance, inevitably find themselves trying to memorize some six-digit number with an image of Danny Devito, say, doing something personally gallant with a much-loved aunt and then can never really forget it.
Notwithstanding Phil's and others' point about the quantity of variations, I think there is an argument for a memorization scheme for go patterns that has little or no relation to the meanings of moves, in particular for adults. I took up this game aged 40 and have had, perhaps, more time than other folk my age to devote to it. I've experienced some of the differences between how grown-ups learn this and how kids learn. Quite aside from kids just having all those extra years under their lee, kids can suck up patterns by the boatload and remember them, while adults forget them routinely. And kids can develop a facility for deeper and more precise reading that an adult mind not previously trained has a hard time matching. On the other hand, adults have a capacity for planning, reasoning, strategizing, deliberate repetition and methodical plugging away that kids often do not.
When you ask teachers why all the tsumego, they'll often answer because it makes your reading stronger. Press them on it, and they say it means you recognize the easy or clear patterns quickly and you don't then have to read them out laboriously; you just know and can spend your time on the novel or interesting features of the situation. Surely tsumego increase reading capacity, but they may also enable the perhaps fixed and feeble capacity of someone to read to be put to better use. Part of it is puzzle practice, part is rote, almost ritual, memorization.
In the case of joseki, the argument goes, the pattern memorization is harder and less useful than the reasoning that should go into picking a move. Memorizing a huge volume of joseki is a vast amount of labor and doesn't tell you want to do when play diverges from the text. Learn a few key ones, but mainly learn the reasoning behind moves and then you can make your own decisions about moves. A bunch of problems with this. One is that I and my fellow older folks have studied the meaning of lots of moves, some of them over and over again, and the moves just vanish, and with them, I suspect, much of the meaning. I'd give you an example, except I don't remember one. I study stuff and then, when I play, I am tempted by some suicidal doppelganger of a Taisha that involves me losing both sides and control of a quarter of the board, and I am reduced to trying to read out each variation and the meaning of each move, which does not play to my strengths at all. If I lament this, the answer is, "if you're not clear about it, you can always avoid the Taisha." Well that may be good advice for me, but clearly cannot be universal advice about learning go.
A second is that memorization, if only as a by-product, does seem to have taken place for others. Reviewing games with strong players and pros, they'll instantly come up with stuff about how this move's better than that one due to the ladder etc. They've remembered it; sometimes they analyze on the spot, but a lot of times, they just remember it, having seen it before. Another is that memorization is sometimes deliberate. Go teachers urge us not to memorize joseki; is it clear they don't urge memorization on eight year olds they think have the chance to be strong?
Lastly, and this is why this fellow's efforts intrigue me, I'm not sure we know how vast the amount of labor is for the motivated adult. Simply remembering joseki isn't going to happen easily, and doing it brute force without a method would be huge. But for me it was the same with poetry. Brute force didn't work. I tried 10 times to memorize Gray's Elegy and every time, the next day, a cow from the "lowing herd" in line two would moo at me and I'd forget it all. Then I applied a method and it was easy. And that kind of method plays to the strengths of an adult, like a recipe or an instruction manual or a good map. As to the objection that not working on the meaning means you'll know a lot of useless patterns, I'm not sure that's the case. Certainly with poetry, the palace fades with repetition. When I recite Gray to myself now, there is no rotting ear of corn, no genial flatfish, no Hermione Granger smirking. Now I can contemplate in great detail the poem because I have it at hand all the time. In go, I can learn from the colossal failure of a memorized joseki after playing it at the wrong time or place a couple of times in a tournament game. I can learn a variation or two of it that might solve the problem. I can learn "never play that one." I can't learn any of those things, though, if I can't play the joseki in practice. Lacking the extra years and the brain plasticity, what I can apply to the problem is a method.
snorri wrote:So, I spent a fair amount of effort on this some months ago and learned a lot, but this thread is hijacked by people whose opinions may differ from what I found, so I'm reluctant to comment.
Doesn't seem hijacked to me yet? Anyway, I'd like to hear anything you found in relation to my original question.
Agree with quantumf, it doesn't seem hijacked, although it has more opinions against the technique. I don't see myself as using it sucessfully,but it's interesting to read others that have.
snorri wrote:So, I spent a fair amount of effort on this some months ago and learned a lot, but this thread is hijacked by people whose opinions may differ from what I found, so I'm reluctant to comment.
Doesn't seem hijacked to me yet? Anyway, I'd like to hear anything you found in relation to my original question.
Agree with quantumf, it doesn't seem hijacked, although it has more opinions against the technique. I don't see myself as using it successfully, but it's interesting to read others that have.
So here's what I did, briefly, and I'll add more if there is interest:
First of all, I did read books such as Moonwalking with Einstein and others and I also hung out on mnemotechnics.org for a while. I learned the theory and practice of such techniques and spent a long time figuring out what would make sense for Go and what I could get out of it for time invested. I concluded that the main benefit that would be of interest to me is remembering games, both professional games and my own. And I'll be completely frank about the scenario I was envisioning. There are certain situations in one's life where one has to sit around and it's fine to sit quietly and say nothing, but is not considered socially acceptable pop out a go book or electronic device and start obviously clicking through games. These times are different for different people---it could be at church or at a boring meeting, for example. So I wanted the ability to think productively about Go during these times.
As has been mentioned, Go moves are not random. So at first I tried to create a system to remember sequences that have some Go meaning, such as haengma. But I gave up on that because upon examination, the moves that were hard to remember in pro games were tenukis. The timing of a kikashi, for example. So I reluctantly concluded I needed to be able to encode moves more precisely, via something like coordinates or very close to that.
The system I came up with was to divide the Go board into 4 quadrants and then assign each point a two-digit sequence. I then created a multi-component system described here. This would allow me to encode 4 Go moves in a single locus, so about 60 loci for a whole game.
I took the hit of losing the information about which quadrant the move was in, but that's actually resolvable if one reduces the desired moves per locus to 3. I'll explain the math later. In any case, remembering which quadrant a move is in once given the hint of the exact relative position to the nearest corner is not much of an issue for me anyway.
So, first of all, learning such a system is very hard. You have to come up with encodings that are meaningful for to you to remember. Then, once learned, the system has to be practiced or else you forget it. I wouldn't recommend a 3-digit system to anyone who isn't either homeless or planning to become that way. Of course, my system is 40% of the way there. More later as my kid is up. I did not go homeless.
In addition to the overhead of keeping one's system rehearsed, there as also the question of loci if you are using that system. You need a lot of loci and the journeys through these also need to be practiced regularly. Memory competitors will often spend several hours a day training nearing competition. I could not invest such time, so I had to take it a little bit at time.
One thing I learned is the value of imagination in remembering things. The other thing I gained is a better understanding of the variations in my performance depending on whether I was tired, angry, etc. This doesn't come across as well in Go as in memory sports, because in Go whether you win a game or not depends on your opponent as much as you. When using memory techniques, there is no lying to yourself about your progress. It was very enlightening to learn the effects of fatigue and other distractions.
These techniques are quite powerful, but just remember that what you learn has to be reviewed. Memory athletes in fact rely on forgetting. It's a blessing. If you didn't forget, you'd have to keep building new journeys (or palaces) for every practice session! As it is, most people can reuse their loci after a couple of weeks of disuse. But keeping them around isn't too hard because one can use something spaced learning patterns for that. But it does take time and effort.
I think the problems are that people give up before they get any benefits or they try something too ambitious and get discouraged.
Below is the example of the 2-digit encoding I use. I think this is good for go players because the 3-4 point, etc. appears in a canonical direction. If you can imagine a game with the first 4 moves all on 3-4 point, for example, those would be natural placements. So for example, now that one has a digit encoding, one can use any of a number of systems, such as Dominic System or Major System, to encode go moves.
If one has a 3-digit system, which I do not recommend for beginners, then one can do a numbering of the quadrants, and prepend these digits to the numbers above:
So one of the reasons I gave up on the three digit system, besides it being insane, is that well, it's overkill for Go by a big percentage if I wanted to use the same system for digits, which I do. For a 3-digit system, you have 1000 images when you only need 361: 36.1% efficient. In my system, 100 images but I only need 91, so 91% efficient. Well, I actually I have 400 image components, but that's another story and is not related to the waste a 3-digit system would have.
So I think I've disclosed everything that is needed. So I'm out of the closet as an amateur mnemonist on this forum. What a weight off my shoulders! Now I just have to come out as a go player on that other forum, and my karma will be clean. Well, cleaner
Thanks for the detailed posts, snorri, fascinating stuff. Some questions:
Are you able to successfully store and retrieve a large set of joseki's? How many, if I may ask? How do you deal with variations? How do you decide which one to use? Are you still relying on vague ideas of the colour and distance of neighbouring stones or influence vs. territory? Or something more systematic, along the ideas of what Robert discusses?
One thing about the "meaning of the moves" issue-a well-known Korean 7d amateur spent some time at our Go club and spent an hour or so teaching a 3k before the club meetings. Many times I overheard them and she was teaching him josekis or other moves saying "just play here" and he was continually saying "I don't understand the meaning/purpose of this move". It became clear to me over hearing this many many times over the course of a few weeks that she regarded the meaning or purpose of a move as surplus information not necessary to play Go really well, and she would definitely lean in favour of the "just remember the joseki moves by whatever means" side of this argument IMO.
quantumf wrote:Thanks for the detailed posts, snorri, fascinating stuff. Some questions:
Are you able to successfully store and retrieve a large set of joseki's? How many, if I may ask? How do you deal with variations? How do you decide which one to use? Are you still relying on vague ideas of the colour and distance of neighbouring stones or influence vs. territory? Or something more systematic, along the ideas of what Robert discusses?
I haven't tried using this for joseki, just for pro games which are linear and for which the method of loci works better. But I have thought about the variation problem. One way to solve it would be via linking, which is a different technique than the method of loci. The problem with linking is that it's fragile---there is a significant risk of losing an entire branch. This would be a problem if the variations were truly meaningless, but in go I'd expect to be able to use my general knowledge of shape to recover, so maybe it's doable with practice.
As for volume, let's set some expectations. The grandmaster norm for digits is memorizing 1000 in an hour. In 1993 the world record was 900. Now the world record is 2660. So let's say 500 moves in one of these training runs. Probably keep around 10 journeys of this size for training, but if one ditches training and just uses for review of joseki encodings, 5000 moves. Kogo's had about 62,000 moves the last time I checked. I think 5000 moves would be in the ballpark for a grandmaster who knows nothing about go. I am not a grandmaster and I don't know how long it will take to meet that norm. I was probably 30% of the way there at my peak, but my journeys are kind of rusty.
So the conclusion is that I wouldn't do it this way. If I wanted to learn a lot of joseki, I would do it mostly the traditional way and only use mnemotechnics in tough spots.
quantumf wrote:How do you decide which one to use? Are you still relying on vague ideas of the colour and distance of neighbouring stones or influence vs. territory? Or something more systematic, along the ideas of what Robert discusses?
Well since I don't memorize joseki using mnemotechnics and would only use them partially if I did, I'm sorry to disappoint, but I don't think it would make me think differently about the game. The moves I make are influenced by the same ideas from pros and game experience as anyone else's. Would I train up on some crazy joseki variations? Maybe... But the difficulty there is not just about the number of variations in the books, but in how to handle complicated fights in general. Reading ability and shape knowledge tend to dominate there. In real amateur games those fights will get out of the book pretty quickly. But you know, I might try this. The thread is kind of inspiring...
snorri wrote:I haven't tried using this for joseki, just for pro games which are linear and for which the method of loci works better.
When I memorize pro games, I associate the move counter with the move. I hadn't realized I was doing this until I read this thread. So I can look at a stone on the board and say, "this was move 60 (or whatever)". If I lose track of of the move number, I have a hard time remembering where the next move is played. I also have trouble starting the game, but once past the first 8-10 moves, I can usually remember the rest.
snorri wrote:I haven't tried using this for joseki, just for pro games which are linear and for which the method of loci works better. But I have thought about the variation problem. One way to solve it would be via linking, which is a different technique than the method of loci. The problem with linking is that it's fragile---there is a significant risk of losing an entire branch. This would be a problem if the variations were truly meaningless, but in go I'd expect to be able to use my general knowledge of shape to recover, so maybe it's doable with practice.
As for volume, let's set some expectations. The grandmaster norm for digits is memorizing 1000 in an hour. In 1993 the world record was 900. Now the world record is 2660. So let's say 500 moves in one of these training runs. Probably keep around 10 journeys of this size for training, but if one ditches training and just uses for review of joseki encodings, 5000 moves. Kogo's had about 62,000 moves the last time I checked. I think 5000 moves would be in the ballpark for a grandmaster who knows nothing about go. I am not a grandmaster and I don't know how long it will take to meet that norm. I was probably 30% of the way there at my peak, but my journeys are kind of rusty.
I'm terribly sorry for misreading you, or at least, not concentrating, and just replacing your "pro games" with my assumptions of "joseki". Anyway, your descriptions are indeed very interesting and rather inspiring.
Some more questions: - you never did elaborate on the maths of how 4 moves became 3 - am i to understand that 5000 moves is a realistic limit for this encoding system + your memory? Using 250 moves per games suggests that 20 games would be the limit of your memory? Is that correct? While not bad, it seems a bit less than what one would hope to achieve. I would have thought a strong player could remember most of the moves of many pro games without any special techniques, although as you say, the problems mostly being around tenuki/kikashi, and probably end game. Did you consider some sort of hybrid of coordinates along with local joseki sequences?
When I memorize pro games, I associate the move counter with the move. I hadn't realized I was doing this until I read this thread. So I can look at a stone on the board and say, "this was move 60 (or whatever)". If I lose track of of the move number, I have a hard time remembering where the next move is played. I also have trouble starting the game, but once past the first 8-10 moves, I can usually remember the rest.
I took a weekly class for a while with a strong pro from Korea. Homework each week was memorizing a pro game we'd review in class. In one review, I point to a move up on the demo board ask a question and said "If move 130 were one row down ... " or something like that and the pro and the stronger players in the class gave me quite a quizzical look. Turned out I was memorizing the moves attached to the move numbers, speaking the numbers like a metronome when playing over the game and also associating key shifts from one part of the board to another with some of the numbers. I knew they moved from lower left to right center on move 74 ... helped me not forget any less memorable moves along the way. All the strong players used the numbers to find moves on the game diagram, but then just memorized the moves. My approach bemused them rather.
quantumf wrote:you never did elaborate on the maths of how 4 moves became 3
You'll notice that in my first diagram there are duplicates of the 2-digit encodings. If I memorize moves and discard quadrant information, I can use 2-digits per move. Since I can store 8 digits per locus, that's 4 moves per locus.
But if I really care about keeping the quadrant information, then I could sacrifice two of the 8 digits in the following way:
relative move 1 (2 digits) + relative move 2 (2 digits) + relative move 3 (2 digits) + (6 bits of information encoding quadrants for moves 1-3) (2 digits)
This is because the quadrant information for 3 moves is 6 bits which can fit in the range 0-63 and therefore can be represented as a two-digit decimal number.
I don't like that much, though, because I like my persons to always be black. (Wait, that didn't come out right. Anyway, the parity shift of an odd number of components would bug me.
Another option is to use a smaller, PAO system, and two moves per locus with complete information. You only have 16 possible actions. I don't like that as much because the actions would repeat a lot. Consider how many times in a game a white move is in the same quadrant as the previous black move! I studied this. It's a lot. Excessive repetition is a source of errors when using memory techniques, and most memory athletes will go to some length to avoid them.
quantum wrote:am i to understand that 5000 moves is a realistic limit for this encoding system + your memory? Using 250 moves per games suggests that 20 games would be the limit of your memory? Is that correct? While not bad, it seems a bit less than what one would hope to achieve. I would have thought a strong player could remember most of the moves of many pro games without any special techniques, although as you say, the problems mostly being around tenuki/kikashi, and probably end game. Did you consider some sort of hybrid of coordinates along with local joseki sequences?
It's an estimate, but I'm not saying one couldn't do more with more dedicated practice or by starting younger, etc. or just being crazier. Take a look at this interview with Dr. Yip Swee Chooi who has memorized a huge Chinese-English dictionary.
5000 moves doesn't sound like much, but ask a pro to memorize twenty 250-move games with completely random moves and see how that goes. I treat this as a case of overlearning. There is a coloring to the moves and sequences that gives them a personality. Why do pros encourage you to play over games on a real board? It adds the sense of sound and touch. It's good for the memory to just pile on additional input that may not be pertinent to the thing that is being memorized. That's just the way the brain works. It is not like a hard disk.
Efficiencies for encoding josekis are possible, but most of the game is not joseki, so you really don't save that much. I evaluated a hybrid haengma-coordinate approach, but it suffers from a kind of Amdahl's law. The non-optimized moves become the bottleneck.
) That was perhaps a mistake. I did not memorize joseki, because I did not study joseki. The only life and death problems I studied were in the Maeda series. Because there were not very many at my level, it was easy for me, when reviewing, to remember the answers without reading. Therefore I waited months between reviews, to give me time to forget. Perhaps it would have been better for me to drill them into memory, I don't know. 
A severed limb might mean sacrifice. 
