Hi everyone,

I've been working on a small Go-related project and decided to share it with the community.

Please check out my article:
https://not-perfect.ghost.io/sensaigo/

And the demo video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evyP_wBoC8c

I hope this is of interest to anyone, let me know your thoughts

Best wishes,
Sascha

"the best moves in Go are actually not recent developments"

As a general statement, this is wrong. In AI study, I have discovered very many moves that AI analysis determines as correct and that previous human play has not known.

"All these types of feedback happen after the actual game"

Why only after games and not also after sequences or individual moves?

"The feedback should be a very simple signal that can be subconsciously understood"

AI often distinguishes between correct and mistake in ways that cannot be perceived "intuitively" but can also be understood by explanations of non-statistical reasoning. (There are also cases accessible by subconsicious thinking, but by far not all.)

"engine live-evaluates the position from viewpoint of the player [...] immediately knowing when you've made a mistake [...] this direction of development and research is worth following up on, not only for the game of Go, but for other domains"

Good ideas... but what you suggest requires invention of an extremely powerful expert system, more powerful, in particular, than the combined literature and the literature of the next at least 20 (maybe hundreds of) years.

"This claim is of course impossible to verify"

The claim is easily refuted on the short time scale by counter-examples of players, such as me, having gained necessarily non-subconscious learning insights from AI study.

Hi Robert,

first thanks for engaging, although it seems you misunderstood me in some points, so let me correct this.


You're misquoting here. In the sentence I'm talking about search algorithms - which have been Monte-Carlo based since many years before neural networks were introduced.


Sure we might realize during the game that an earlier move/sequence was not correct, but I was talking about reviews, analysis and discussions which we don't usually do during a live game...


An extremely powerful expert system, more powerful than all the combined literature... Well this has already been invented That's the point.


You should brush up on your understanding of logic, Robert, that is no refutation at all.

The thesis is "Longterm training with live AI feedback (in addition to "classical" training) has the potential to improve evaluation, judgement, intuition and playing strength in general". A counter-example would be if someone had actually studied this way for a long time but seen no improvement. And even one counter-example wouldn't be a refutation since I'm not making all-or-nothing claims here.
The only scientifically valid way to approach this would be to have a group of players (big enough to be statistically relevant) train longterm (months/years) with this method and compare their improvement with a control group that followed the exact same training regimen, only leaving out the live feedback during games.

Anyway my point is not to devalue any existing methods for improvement (play, study, tsumego etc.), on the contrary, they are absolutely necessary. I'm just proposing that we can add something more to get a little extra boost.

The human brain is an all-purpose learning system, and it might be able to incorporate AI feedback signals as well in order to improve it's internal model of the game of Go (or other domains).

That is my theory and only time will tell us if there's anything to it.

Oh, so with "move" you have meant "progress", I see.

In my AI use, I mostly analyse single moves or short sequences. Therefore, one need not always consider whole game sequences.

What? Current AI an "expert system"? Rather close to the contrary.

And no, current AI is not more powerful than all the combined literature. It only has - most of the time - stronger play. With "powerful", however, I also understand "power of providing reasoning". There, current AI is extremely weak while all the combined literature is comparatively strong.

"The thesis is 'Longterm training with live AI feedback (in addition to 'classical' training) has the potential to improve evaluation, judgement, intuition and playing strength in general'."

I see. This is not outrageous but reasonable. It does not even claim to be remotely as effective as long-term training with the literature etc. (Of course, claims can be adjusted...)

"Anyway my point is not to devalue any existing methods for improvement (play, study, tsumego etc.), on the contrary, they are absolutely necessary. I'm just proposing that we can add something more to get a little extra boost."

Fair enough.

First, I'm totally with the OP idea: how to bring "immediate feedback" into "many repetitions". This is the conundrum of Go improvement: the usual feedback mechanism is win/lose but then you don't get many repetitions. You can evaluate the moves but only after the game, so the feedback is no longer instantaneous.

Yet there remains a problem: the "many repetitions" of subsequent moves are rarely actual repetitions. They vary in nature. Even if you get immediate feedback on move N, that teaches you little about move N+1, so you can't really take the instant feedback into the next repetitions, unlike a practice session on your forehand topspin in tennis, for example.

My solution is somewhere halfway: suppose the thing you want to work on is "invading/reducing moyos". Then you can select a number of games (by Takemiya e.g.) having such moyos and then try solving the question on game 1 + analysis with AI. Using that feedback you go into game 2. Again, these are not exactly repetitions of the same challenge (which would train your memory, not your solving skills), but they are similar enough to provide some kind of deliberate practice.

Secondly, reacting to Robert pointing out AI's weakness at articulated knowledge. I agree that articulated knowledge brings any type of expertise to a higher level, collectively speaking. Novices will benefit from books. Amateurs up to my level still benefit from that too. But there's IMO a threshold. At some point, articulation slows down the learning. Pros can look at AI sequences and figure out what they mean, applying it to their game, without articulating it in any form. Expert knowledge goes beyond language (yes, I'm defying the great Feynman here). You can see this even when pros perform post-game analysis. There's not much talking going on, mostly laying out sequences. The stones do the talking, words would slow them down.

What this means for us is that we shouldn't indulge in the absence of articulated AI understanding. We can look into the sequences offered, and compare them to the sequences we thought of during the game, or during our non-AI-review of the game. Occasionally, we will discover a pattern that might deserve articulation, cfr. the "slonection" I once coined, even if that helped only me.

Not "up to your level". At my higher level, the fastest way of learning go theory still is articulated knowledge in books. The problem is not any limitation of my ability to learn from that but the problem is the only tiny amounts of articulated knowledge in books suitable for at least my level! I do not have the slightest doubt that articulated knowledge in books would also be my fastest way of learning go theory at any higher level. (Of course, such is insufficient for overall strength increase, which must also improve skills of calculation, tactics etc.)



My opinion is contrary.



I (amateur player) look at AI sequences, figure out what they mean and apply it to my game play. I can do so without articulating it to others. Doing so with also articulating it in writing to myself or others eases my application to my game play because I can look up the contents again whenever useful.

That pro players do not (or only hardly) articulate it to others is no evidence that they (unless of the subconscious only type) would not reflect their insight explicitly in their own thinking.



Such weak teaching is not evidence that explicit explanations could not be very much better.

When I study (e.g., AI) sequences, looking at the raw sequences is only the first step of learning. Inferring articulated go theory is a later, and extraordinarily more effective, step of learning.



Terrible advice.

It is sometimes hard to tell what people mean when they talk about learning Go. To me that means improving at playing the game from start to finish and to the best of my knowledge you need to play games, from start to finish, without any external aid if you wish to improve at this. Everything else that you do is support for the main activity of playing games. However, there are other views.

To me playing games is practice, exercise and repetition. The proposed method of constantly giving hints to the player is something very different from what I'd wish to call a game (but what to call it ). Add hints about the progress and now we are no longer practicing how to play a game without hints and we don't have an uninterrupted repetition of the mental process that goes into playing a game. Presumable this activity replaces actually playing Go with the opponent and that is the main harm.

As far as I know such signaling of how an exercises is going isn't considered conductive for learning in general. If so, then this must be especially true for Go. Much of the skill of playing Go is in perseverance when facing difficult situations. The best players are after all the ones that are the most dangerous when they should be losing, not the ones that declare the game over one way or the other. When you have hints during a game it has to imped your ability to see the game in the same way as you would if you had no aid. By doing this you remove your most important sense during the exercise, the sense of how the game is going. Yet, the goal of the whole exercise is to exercise your own senses of Go and learn to rely on yourself.

I think it is counterproductive to have any such feedback during a game. Between games is a different story.

Probably the best thing you do besides playing games is a brief review of your games while the memory of playing them is fresh. Possibly the second thing is another brief review when the memory of playing the game is starting to fade. I won't pretend to offer scientific proof, but remembering what you were doing must be crucial for improving on it, right? Possibly remembering what you were doing for longer is correlated to how much you improve. Of course, there may also be games that are better forgotten

Studying books and games (as opposed to brief reviews) is undoubtedly good but it is tertiary activity (if playing games is primary and brief reviews are secondary). The same goes for studying life and death, shape or anything else, it is tertiary activity that should accompany playing games and brief reviews of what you were doing in those games.

Computer programs are of course great for exploring shapes and testing your reasoning about some positions, their main drawbacks is that they still tend to be fairly opinionated and they often prefer going down the rabbit hole over the simple solutions that often work better in practice. Their evaluation often isn't objective for human vs. human game and it gets worse the farther you are from their level of play.

Books have similar problem, the advice often isn't objective when transferred from the pages of the book, especially by someone who is still learning what the book presents. At least books are (still) written by humans that can try to put themselves in the shoes of the reader.

I suspect most people here reading this would says, "Yes, yes", but I think that's because they will mostly have learned go by a similar, western route. In reality, I think there's a fundamental flaw.

Most players in Japan, Korea and China learn go by playing with family or friends at home or school. They will typically have absorbed a massive amount of go knowledge into their intuition before they even own their first go book. But when they do encounter their first books, they will find that they are written specifically for them, which means the writer will assume this large bank of intuitive knowledge exists in his readers, and he will further assume that when he uses certain words, his readers will understand them in the way he meant them.

In stark contrast, the typical western player skips the early intuition-building playing stage and learns from books instead (other book-fed western players). These books are more often than not translation of Oriental books, and so are full of strange concepts and strange words. Some communication happens, of course, but it is gappy and blighted in various ways. Go intuition is then typically replaced the dead-end path of logic.

There is nothing magic in the intuition the Oriental players rely on. We all can, and do, use intuition in our daily lives - even to a 9-dan level. It's just that in go we skipped the intuition stage. To give a personal example from yesterday, I met my son-in-law after not seeing him for a while, and the first words he says to me were, "2-nil up." I know instantly what he means, not just literally but all the nuances. I might reply, "Ah, 1953." He understands perfectly, even though he is a Chelsea supporter. Then we switch to talking about something else. What I have understood is that Newcastle United are doing well against a fancied team in the FA Cup (soccer) and I can now hope for their glory days of 1953 again. If we had that conversation surrounded by Newcastle football fans, most of them would understand instantly what we are talking about, even if they miss a few nuances. Everyone here can cite similar examples from their own experience.

It should therefore be no surprise when a go pro, talking to other go players - an audience he knows well - just says, "The hane looks good." He knows they will spot the hane on move 13 because they all share the same intuition of how moves will flow to reach that point. Communication can break down sometimes, of course, such as when Kitani hummed and hawed about a particular sequence by chuntering about a yose-ko. His audience was mystified. But the ko in question was 40 moves ahead! Still, once he demonstrated it, the audience didn't have to be tutored as to what a yose-ko was and why it mattered.

The underlying point there is that communication (and thus articulation) is still taking place, even if it is in shorthand. And intuition-based communication supplemented by knowledge from books that all mean the same thing to the audience is so efficient that such shorthand is possible.

If you look at Oriental books and analyse the language, you will find that a great deal of knowledge is assumed. That is, it is not articulated in the book because it is assumed to have been articulated, via the intuition at an earlier stage.

I just happen to have in front of me an example of some of the threads implied in what I have just said. It is a commentary by Go Seigen on one of his games against Iwamoto. It is 1948-11-16s if you want to look it up in the GoGo0D database. A crucial part of the game is shown below (White to play; no komi; both have captured 4).

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$W
$$ -----------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . O . O . O X a |
$$ | . f . . . . . . . . . O X O O O . O X |
$$ | . . X O O X . O . X . O X X X O O X . |
$$ | . . X , . . . . . , . O X . X X X . . |
$$ | . . . O . O . O . X X O O X X X . X . |
$$ | . . O . . . . . b O O X X O O O O O . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . X X . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . O X X . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . X O O O . O . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . X X X X O . . . |
$$ | . . . X X . . . . . . . . O X O X . . |
$$ | . . . . O . O . . . . . . . O X X . . |
$$ | . . X . O . . c . . . . . . O O X . . |
$$ | . e . O X . . . . . O . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . O O . . . . . . . . . . . . X . . |
$$ | . . X , . X . . . , X . . d . X . . . |
$$ | . . . X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ ----------------------------------------|[/go]

A ko has been going on in the upper-right corner. The size of it clearly affects the whole game significantly. However, there is no commentary relating to its size (this is normal - the size of any play is rarely discussed). What has been discussed is the fact that this is a yose-ko that is not a yose-ko, i.e. there are extra liberties, and the possibility of a two-stage ko was discussed. At no point was the definition of either a yose-ko (of either type) or a two-stage ko discussed. And so all this, including the ability to count these freaky kos, was knowledge the reader was assumed to have (or have access to). The only count that was mentioned (or, rather, implied) was the number of ko threats, but only in the sense that White had more of them. The significance of this was not directly discussed, and it came up only in the sense of Black deciding to look for gains elsewhere. More assumptions.

In this specific position, White's move 102 was discussed. The discussion centred on whether White could take the ko at 'a'. But that was not considered a valid option because Black would play the "two-stone ponnuki" (二目ポンウキ) at 'b' (which is the move White correctly played). This is an example where most western players would think it's not a ponnuki because it's not a diamond shape - an example of how their faulty understanding of terms holds them back. The Japanese reader, however, would get the correct nuance that this is not really anything to do with shape but signifies a wow capture (nuki) - he would metaphorically hear the plop (pon) of a champagne cork being popped, and his eyes would light up at the coming feast. In that frame of mind (and instead of of muttering "that's not a diamond shape"), he would then seamlessly grasp the next point of the commentary, which was that Black would next be able to gorge himself by playing at 'c' in return for surrendering the upper-right corner.

Furthermore, the reader would understand (intuitively) the significance of the description of move 'c' as a karami, often used in English but sometimes rendered as something like a 'twisting attack' in English. But Go Seigen didn't use the locution 'to attack' (semeru). Instead, he used the verb semaru (simply 'to put pressure on'). And again the Japanese reader would realise instantly that he needn't expect to kill any White group - he just needs to pressurise the two White groups simultaneously to bring in a bumper harvest.

Stronger western players would grasp these nuances, of course, but (I believe) they would not come to mind so intuitively and naturally - they'd be part of a conscious thought process instead. And weaker players would just flail in the darkness - "what's a karami?"

The continuation of the commentary follows the same path of discussing mainly tactics, with strategy being left largely unspoken but assumed to be obvious. For example, the upper-right ended in a live-live situation (again, size not mentioned) and a bit later White played at 'd'. The commentary then said Black took the opportunity to tenuki (another term that means subtly different things to Japanese and English readers - the real sense is not 'playing elsewhere' but 'skipping a move', which implies having to come back later). In fact he played two "skips" at 'e' and 'f', and the argument in favour of this way of play by Black (which was Go, the commentator) was that he was "thick" (another loaded term) at the top and so could fight in the corner. He ended winning by 12 points (no komi).

My point is that the typical western reader of such commentaries (this style really is the norm) is approaching them from the disadvantaged standpoint of not having much in the bank in the way of intuition, and even when he is reading the same book as a Japanese person, he is not quite getting quite the same information from it.

I'm sure all this goes a long way to explain why western players find it hard to get to the top. Realistically, we can't expect a situation where many western kids will play the game at home or school in the way Oriental players, do. As to books, I happen to believe that, ironically, many of the early English translations may have done a disservice to western players (the concepts of thickness = walls and yose = endgame are the glaring examples, but there are many others).

If the goal is to produce stronger western players, it may, therefore, be that case that our best opportunity is to use AI as the springboard for a new vocabulary - our own, based on a tabula rasa - and a new way of looking at go theory. Personally, I think the lack of opportunity to play just to build up one's intuitive play early in one's go career may be too much of a handicap for most people to contribute, and too few contributors would not create a groundswell. But there's no harm in trying, and just the effort of trying will lead to some improvement for the individual.

Not 'strange' but often 'non-Oriental'.



Contrary to your metaphor, logic starts from and creates truths.



If only they did.



In ko fights during the middle game, there are alternative evaluations to move values, such as judgements after ko dissolutions.

For other moves, move values are often not discussed because a) explanations skip the (late) endgame and b) calculation consumes more time and space than teachers spend when they have enough other things to explain so can avoid the tedious aspects.



Yes, likely.



There are several reasons. (One of them has become less severe: missing strong opponents are mitigated by AI opponents.)



I have been doing the tabula rasa approach to new vocabulary. I do not see how AI (pure moves and their statistics) provides any vocabulary - please suggest a related approach!

This may have been true for us, who learned go before servers came into play. The difference between real-life go and server go aside, nowadays most western players play many more games than we did, and they often skip books. Instead they might turn to youtube for information, where at least Michael Redmond, then again the female Korean pro Yeon-Woo and Baduk Doctor have channels of varying educational quality. I dare say Nate (TelegraphGo) is doing a very good job in bringing pro level games within reach of amateur understanding. There's of course some lower quality content available too and overall the Internet poses the big threat of too much information, or rather infotainment.



You are making a good analogy here: despite the availability of online content on football/soccer, our collective intuition about the game is still levels above that of the average Chinese football afficionado, because we've been playing it since childhood.



Much like a commentary on a football game might scream "OMG what's he doing???" when a defender heads the ball into the center rather than to the outside. We all know that's risky.



Thanks for bringing a diagram into the discussion!

I was expecting you to give a reasoning by Go Seigen why the ko would be better than B. With one glance, I identified B as the point to play. Even evaluating the ko as being about 50 points (not going into the subtlety of approach kos reducing the size) I still wanted to play B. The only doubt I had was the livelihood of the white group on the right side. Anyway I would play B without much hesitation and only then start thinking about the ko fight.



That, and the opportunity to play strong opponents from an early age, also in live circumstances.



Agree. I may seem to contradict my earlier post but my point is rather that, YES, we need good theory, concepts, "articulation" to provide for the fertile soil where western players can grow. But NO, after a certain point (5d?), the expertise no longer requires vocabulary driven knowledge but rather a word-less environment where the concepts are articulated through moves, sequences and positional evaluation, much like the interface AI is providing us with. I also don't think a deep study of e.g. miai values, articulated via game trees and fractional numbers, will make you leap from 5d to pro level. I can fathom though how a 9p with total knowledge of endgame values gets an edge over a 9p who doesn't.

I know there is distrust of youtubers for various reasons, but when I look at Baduk Doctor's game reviews, I see him mostly running through sequences and pointing out moves that he would never have thought of, or polish his intuition about why a group can be left alone despite its looking heavy. I'll make an exception for the concept that surfaces most in high level analyses by the likes of BadukDoctor or TelegraphGo: "a favorable exchange". This is of course almost a meaningless phrase in itself but underneath that superficial concept lies an understanding that we articulators may want to explore more.

Do you have some source for that? I'm genuinely interested.

That's exactly why I think training with immediate feedback is worth pursuing.
From my own limited experience using the system I can say that the instant feedback for some huge mistakes and my natural emotional reaction of "Damn, I just f***ed up" has really "burned" those shapes into my mind.
Of course, the review afterwards was still necessary to find out how I should've played.

Concerning the discussion of articulated knowledge/reasoning vs. intuition:
I think articulated knowledge is immensely helpful for improvement, I credit a lot of my personal progress to some amazing books, but it definitely has its limits.
Firstly, it cannot cover all situations, as it's by nature a simplification/generalization of an immensely complex domain. And secondly - maybe more important - it is too slow.
We cannot possibly reason about all possible moves on the board in the limited time we have during a game, we dismiss probably 95% of all legal moves intuitively (depending on the stage of the game).
Our focus is drawn to some candidate moves that just "feel good", and from there we try to read continuations and evaluate the possible outcomes.
While reasoning is important for decision making in Go, intuition is essential for pruning the search space and also for evaluation.

On a side note:
The kind of "expert system" Robert seems to envision is actually how AI/Machine Learning was first approached in the 70s/80s, by trying to encode human knowledge in rule-based software,
I think the first chess programs (maybe also Go ones?) were implemented like this.
However that approach never went anywhere as it is too general and can't properly deal with unknown situations.

A last real-world example:
I've become very passionate about playing basketball over the past few years. I'm a "study" type and have invested a lot of time learning about the game.
I have so much knowledge accumulated in my head and it has definitely helped a lot with improvement, but actually applying this knowledge during a game is a whole other beast.
Decisions have to be taken in fractions of a second, ball and players are moving constantly, there is just no time to consciously process everything. Not to mention that your body has to be capable
of actually executing everything you want it to. But with repetition and experience these processes become more automated/intuitive and decision making becomes much faster.

The analogy might not be perfect, although - believe it or not - I actually discovered some related concepts in Basketball and Go.
I might write a post about that sometime

I agree with your first statement: the goal is to improve at playing the game from start to finish without external aid. Let's call this "performance". The only way to know if you have improved your performance, is to perform more (play) and measure the outcome (review).
Your second statement is probably equivalent to my previous sentence but the categorization of everything else as tertiary activities suggests that all training which is NOT by means of performance is of a much lower importance. Here I'm not so sure.

It's always dangerous to draw from other fields, but it can also be instructive. Besides Go I play the guitar and table tennis. It is definitely NOT true that the main way to improve at the guitar is playing more songs. The main method of training is to isolate the tough parts in the song and focus training sessions on improving those. Then you bring it all together again to see if the performance is improving. Likewise in table tennis one doesn't improve efficiently by always playing matches. You work on your serve and other strokes in isolation. I can dwell on training programs in both areas but you'll agree with me just "performing" is not enough and you may agree that it doesn't constitute the bulk of training.

I do have a harder time to make similar constructions in Go. The common "isolated training" consists of joseki, life and death, and endgame. However, the impact on one's performance (winning games) of such training is not as strong as in the abovementioned skills. There are even proverbs saying (rote) learning joseki makes you weaker, suggesting the whole (board) always defies the sum of the parts.



Not sure. Yes, if you are always doing that. Perhaps not if it's just a part of your training program. Why would "supervised learning" during a game be so bad? Why would you always have to figure out everything for yourself?



That's what we're having today. It's not bad. But I understand the OP is looking for an improvement on that.



http://www.neuralnetgoproblems.com is doing a good job at countering your argument.

At the risk of distracting from the main point, this Western kyu-level player has learned that the tortoise-shell shape formed by capturing at B is incredibly strong ("the tortoise shell is worth 60 points" is in John Power's proverbs book) and my eye is drawn to it even more than a ponnuki.

Absolutely disagree.



Of course not. It is never only one aspect of the game that would be sufficient for much improvement. It is always the combination of all aspects of the game! Counting AND tactical reading AND positional judgement AND strategy AND psychology AND time management etc.

For complete analysis of early positions, it is too slow. For correct analysis of late positions or almost correct analysis of positions with certain characteristics enabling simplified analysis, it is fast; as fast as subconscious thinking but furthermore almost correct while the latter can be correct or wrong.



"Intuition" or analytical means enable this pruning. Therefore, "intuition" is non-essential. From the POV of analytics, means such as proximity or greater number (such as of stones) enable fast pruning.



No. The old computer go expert systems relied on very weak human knowledge, such as shape names. Contrarily I describe strong human knowledge, such as mathematically proved theory or much more generally applicable concepts. My knowledge is not explored far enough to allow strong computer expert systems, except for certain classes of already solved simplified / late game positions. Currently my knowledge is much more useful for human players than computer players because we can cope with knowledge gaps while computers still need to be programmed to combine expert input with deep learning whereever gaps remain.



"Too general" is a wrong description. Rather you mean something like: pretended to be more general than it was.



Of course, it could deal with them if there was the fall-back to deep learning whenever generalising knowledge cannot solve something because of violated assumptions for its application.

It does distract from the main point, I think - or at least one of MY main points. Calling it a tortoise shell (maybe turtle shell is better?) is focusing on the shape - a major western fault, in my view. Go Seigen focuses on the pon effect produced by the nuki - dynamic over static, suji over katachi. You seem also to be trying to drag the conversation back to the shape aspects by making a distinction between a tortoise shell and a ponnuki. How many more times do I have to say that the move that produces a tortoise shell IS a ponnuki. It's a nuki (capture) that creates the effect pon (plop, wow, etc). The biggest ponnuki I have seen mentioned as such (I think it was an example by Kitani) was a 9-stone capture.

The tortoise shell proverb certainly exists in Japanese but I don't think I've ever seen it outside of a proverbs book or a dictionary of terms. Commentaries use the "X-stone ponnuki" version. To stress the point, Hayashi Yutaka's go encyclopaedia describes the tortoise shell as follows: "A shape produced by a ponnuki capture of two stones in the form of a tortoise shell." He also adds that if there are extra stones of the capturing side at the corners, "we do not call it a kame no kou." (Hayashi was the editor of Kido among other things.)

The Japanese proverb is usually in the form "ponnuki wa 30 moku, kame no kou 60 moku" which may seem as if ponnuki is being contrasted with kame no kou. But I think you'll find that the effect is additive, not contrastive (i.e. the full meaning is "a single ponnuki is worth 30 points but if you can capture two stones in a ponnuki it is worth 60 points" - there's no contrastive "wa" before 60).

I have not been doing any work on this myself directly, but because of my own interests and professional background I analyse language as a matter of course. I have therefore noticed certain things. I'll mention some of them, but in a higgledy-piggledy fashion in the hope of starting off a brainstorming exercise. I'll number the points, but that is not to imply any kind of order. It's just so that other people can refer back to the individual points if they want to.

1. I have been struck by how similar old Chinese go is to AI go. It has often been remarked that Go Seigen's go looks very like AI go. He was heavily influenced by old Chinese go. There may be a connection.

2. Old Chinese go was heavily influenced by group tax, which has far more impact on ALL phases of the game than you might expect. Among these effects is an emphasis on group connections, even very early in the game. This leads to a great use of call & response (zhaoying) moves early on. It is not necessarily an immediate connection. I like to call them lighthouse moves - where the move stands out as a beacon offering comfort to ships (groups) that may fall into distress on the vast ocean of the board. I am 100% certain this is a feature of AI go.

3. Another feature of old Chinese go is that moyos are rare. This seems to be true also of AI go, too. I suspect the lighthouse moves are there to provide connectability and NOT to create moyo frameworks - this seems to be borne out by the near disappearance of the term "moyos" in commentaries on AI-inspired pro go.

4. There is great reliance on pressuring (jin) as opposed to attacking moves in old Chinese go. This seems matched in modern AI-inspired go where the Japanese are now increasingly referring to semaru instead of semeru.

5. Although I have not seen anyone else use the spider analogy in modern go (it does exist in old Chinese, though), it seems to me that AI go strongly resembles the formation of a spider's web. A spider starts by spinning a sticky thread and lets the wind blow it where it will until it sticks on an object some distance away. It then marches across this thread to add an extra, strengthening strand. This process can be repeated. It seems to me that AI go is similar. It is not specially concerned with bases but with connections across the vast expanse - the empyrean - of the centre of the board. I see the interference presented by the opponent as the effect of the wind. You have to be prepared to follow it - go with the flow.

6. One thing that follows from the web-making analogy is that you have to be flexible. I think that in commentaries this becomes most noticeable in the frequent use of trades (furikawari). I personally don't see this as a technical term - it can't really be defined, and so is more of a descriptive term. But trades do seem to be more frequent in AI-inspired go, and (if that is true) I can see that it would follow from the spider's web style of play.

7. When AI first impacted pro go, there was a lot of mention of AI creating overconcentration of the opponent's shapes early on. That seems to have disappeared. I infer that the reason is that pros have learned to avoid being overconcentrated even more than they did before, and since it rarely occurs in their games now, there is no need to use the term in commenting on their games. But I do think it is still a major element in amateur play, and so needs to be talked about, not just as something to avoid, but as something to do to the opponent. Since you can see it quite easily, it has very useful function as an evaluative term. More subtly, lack of it implies a positive evaluation, but that in itself is nothing new in pro go. I see nothing wrong with using the term "overconcentration" in English.

8. There seems to be great stress now on "efficiency" in commentaries but it somehow seems different. It's certainly not the old kind of tewari efficiency, yet it also seems to be more than avoiding overconcentration. As best as I can judge, it seems to be more to do with stones ending up in a good POSITION (nb position, not shape). And my gut feeling is that good position has a lot to do with stones acting as lighthouse stones (or, if you prefer, as parts of a web).

9. The word 'rhythm' seems to come up as lot. This may just be fashionable use of an English term in place of choushi, but it may also betoken a sense of a different feeling to the concept - something more related to creating a web in the centre.

10. Boundary play, even early in the game, seems to be a big feature of AI go. This mirrors the use of shou in old Chinese go. But it is seems tied in with pressurising moves (jin/semaru). The point is that if you simply pressurise instead of attacking to kill, you do not end up overstretching and leaving gaps behind in your position. With slower pressuring you form natural boundaries in a defect-free way. Of course, if the opponent blunders you can still kill him - your defect-free positions also make that a lot easier, too.

11. The 9-dan Nakane Naoyuki is currently playing a 12-game uchikomi match against Katago. The uchikomi kicks in after each game, so he started at even and lost, then switched to -B- (and lost). Presumably the next game will be at two stones. Interestingly, the time limits are set at 20 seconds a move. I'm guessing that he thinks AI is more likely to make mistakes at that rate, but it also means he is relying largely on his own intuition. But even more interesting is his commentary. It may just be journalistic flourishes but he consistently avoids strategic terms and instead uses similes and metaphors to get his points over. As examples that come to mind, he referred to moves acting like an air-freshener (wafting over the entire board, presumably - lighthouse moves, I'd say). Other moves he has acting in unison like a school choir. In different vein he refers to one move being like a firecracker, and another as a "semaru shocker" (using the English word), both times denoting his consternation at overlooking the AI move.

12. Going back to lighthouse moves, I was sensitised to looking for miai moves by writing my book on Shuei's games. He was famous for his use of miai, and this was often associated with his use of L-shapes facing the centre. I therefore now naturally look for such moves, and what I'm convinced I've seen a lot of in AI play is what I call triai and quadai (i.e. moves that leave 3 or 4 alternative follow-ups instead of just two. That would certainly tie in with lighthouse moves.

13. When I used to actually play go, there was one thing in particular that used to dismay me - and I know I'm far from alone in this among amateurs. It was how often I'd get to the end of the middle game and find that I had lots of open skirts or the like, and if I didn't have sente, the Barbary ape opponents would tease me with monkey jump after monkey jump, snatching all my doughnuts from my sticky fingers. This didn't seem to happen very often with pros, but I couldn't work out why. It happens even less in AI go and at last I think I can see why. AI seems to have a habit of making a lot of early moves on the second line (just like Go Seigen, I'd say) but not to make bases (bases don't seem to mean much to AI). AI does it so that it doesn't have to worry about making these moves later. If you want a term for this, I will grit my teeth and say "early doors." That is a a term I actually hate - it puts my teeth on edge in fact. I've never really understood it, and it's (in my mind) a Cockney or Southern phrase. It was certainly not used where I lived. Some people say it refers to the practice of men queuing up outside pubs just before opening time when licensing laws were strict about opening times - I did see such lines, very long ones, as a kid, but that may be folk etymology. But it may fit in go in another sense: locking the doors on the open sides ultra early.

14. I strongly suspect that the Five Lands theory of Huang Longshi, in which regions of the board are described by five of Sun Zi's nine categories of landscape an army might find itself in, will prove fertile for talking about AI go. You can check out Chapter 11 of the Art of War if that interests you.

Here are a couple of interesting points fron Nakane's latest game with Katago. Katago played 10 next at 'a'. Nakane described this as a probe. Not the first term that would come to mind in traditional go! This is something I have seen elsewhere.

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$B
$$ -----------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 . . . . |
$$ | . . . 2 . . . . . , . . . 8 9 , 1 . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . a . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 . . |
$$ | . . . 4 . . . . . , . . . . 7 , . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ ----------------------------------------|[/go]

Later in the game, Nakane described White 1 (actually 58) as the semaru shocker. Again, semaru is not the first term that would come to mind traditionally, but it served the purpose of semaru (as opposed to semeru) in that White almost the entire lower-left quadrant as a result of pressure on Black's lower-centre group in return for sacrificing the entire group that included White 1 (a trade, in other words - large sacrifices and trades being a feature of AI go)

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$W
$$ -----------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | X O . . O O X . . . X . . . X . . . . |
$$ | . X O O O X X . X . X O . O X . . . . |
$$ | . X X O . O X X . O O . . O X , X . . |
$$ | . . X X O O O O O . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . X O O . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . X X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . O . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . O . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . X . 1 . . . . O . . |
$$ | . . . O . . O . . , . . . . X , X . . |
$$ | . . O . . X . O . X . O . . . X . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ ----------------------------------------|[/go]

Thank you for your ideas of some aspects worth looking for! Some of them might deserve terms while some others are better described as strategies. Part of these ideas I have not, or not fully, had so far. A reason might be that I have concentrated on the opening while your observations might be more relevant during the middle game. After half a year of AI opening study, I have just double-checked my related new go theory:

- 0 new terms from AI study. (My tabula rasa terminology of the previous 28 years has been sufficient so far.)

- 2 terms inferred from statistics and descriptions by AI programmers: empirical score (as shown in AI GUIs per move candidate); confidence (level) (interpreted due to the number of visits of a move candidate; for convenience, classified as levels for ranges of such numbers).

- 7 new principles of go theory.

- 4 of my principles of go theory got a higher relevance than I had assessed before. (I have not reevaluated extensively yet which of my many other principles and methods persist or need to go.)

I think you disagree. You are saying that you think playing games is performance and you appear to have interpreted what I wrote and then raised questions about, or even taken issues with, that interpretation. It is when you write "Your second statement is probably equivalent to my previous sentence..." that you appear to completely remove what I wrote from consideration. The thing is that playing games isn't only performance. Most of the time it is just practice or exercise. Surely you agree that there is a need to practice, to exercise and to repeat the mental process that goes into finding a move until it is second nature?

Then I'm not sure why you interpret what I wrote to mean that every activity other than playing is of much lower importance. Instead it means that the tertiary activity depends on the primary and secondary activity, if you don't do the first two there is little purpose in the the third. It is not that the third level is of low importance, it is that it supports the first two.



I think there are two reasons for that:
1. Sometimes this kind of training strengthens skills that are rarely needed, sometimes you just won't be able to detect the change until much later.
2. It can be difficult during training to get into the same mindset that you are in when you need to use the skills.

Of course you can try to overcome these limitations, for example you could have better designed exercises or work on getting into the right mindset. Another way is to play games, one thing that Go has over many other activities is that is it rather easy to play and review.



Now, I don't know what argument that is or how it is countered. My limited experience with those problems is that they aren't that great. Does it really have any relevance to what I wrote?

It is what the education professionals in my Go club tell me. I don't think it needs much discussion that if you interrupt an exercise that it is likely to have a negative effect. As far as I see your suggestion it is interrupting the task, it is a distraction from the task, but with the nuance that there is some information being conveyed that is useful for completing the task. Yet the question is not if the task can be performed better, the question is if something is learned faster this way. I'm not sure what that something would be, is it the feedback itself?

In your video you show a game in progress on an online platform and some audio feedback at the same time. Now you talk about your experience playing while having such feedback. Who did you play?