BTW:

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Bc Black to play
$$ +------------
$$ | 2 3 1 O X .
$$ | . 4 . O X .
$$ | O O O O X .
$$ | X X X X X .
$$ | . . . . . .[/go]

makes ko.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Thank you!

Obviously I did not think far enough to see that sacrificing those stones is worth it.



Plus, I thought in this, black would be lost (square 4), if white takes A18.
Didn't think of black's throw in-atari.
Obviously, sacrificing stones for a bigger goal is not on my mind (yet, I hope).

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Bc Black to play
$$ +------------
$$ | 2 . 1 O X .
$$ | . . . O X .
$$ | O O O O X .
$$ | X X X X X .
$$ | . . . . . .[/go]

@Bill:

Thank you for making full-SGF, I overlooked (and hopefully learned) much there!

Thanks also for explaining the ko terminology in such simple words.
I had heard of a move the opponent has to answer, but did not know this was a ko-threat (I thought a ko-threat was threatening to make a ko situation).

I misspoke slightly. A player can ignore a ko threat, and sometimes that's the right thing to do.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

So, what is exactly our community's distinction on reading v. visualization?

I definitely "see" the stones on the board when I am reading through variations.. but only up to a certain point. Once I'm reading deeper than 15 stones or so, and it becomes more global, I lose focus on "seeing" the stones, and the reading becomes more logical based on where I know stones should be, knowing where I should play globally based on what I expect the context of the board to be. For example, say I read a variation where I get a corner and my opponent gets the outside, then I won't focus on memorizing the exact stone placements, but understanding that in that variation the opponent has 'thickness' and visualize another pattern in a different area of the board. Is this sort of the distinction we have come up with?

On a side note, how deep can you guys read? I'm around 1D and I have been able to count a little over 20 moves deep in a large life and death fight expanding from a corner into the side/center. Makes me wonder what our resident 3/4/5D and higher can do.. and by extension a pro.

I am 5k on some servers (KGS, Fox) and 8k EGF, and I've never been able to read more than 10 moves deep (except special situations like ladders). I regularly misread move 2. No wonder I am so far from dan level.

Here's a 1 hour online tournament game I annotated with some of my in-game reading: http://eidogo.com/#300G4navp. I'd recommend Lee Sedol's commented games books to see what a top pro reads during a game. Accuracy in breadth is generally more important than high-depth (though for something like a fight ending with semeai you sometimes need the big depth too): no point reading 40 moves deep when you missed opponent's good move 4. Pros are not immune to such reading failures, I've seen plenty of commentaries with things like "I didn't expect that reply" ie didn't read enough choices for move 2.

I try not to get in a situation where I HAVE to read that deep. Most of the time if you get that far into reading, you are in some type of trouble. It's at the point where win or lose that fight, and you win or lose the game. If you watch dwyrin's YouTube basics, you will see that he focuses a lot on direction of play/sente and he can regular dispose of mid-level dans easily. I would say you can get to dan level only being able to read five-ten moves deep, as long as you are perfectly correct in your reading.

Thank you for posting this game. I appreciated your comments and it was insightful. It encourages me to continue to work on reading seriously/playing slower games, rather than normal time settings and just playing based off of intuition/shape (which is my normal playing mentality).

IMO, reading depth and breadth are difficult to quantify objectively. The reason is because all moves are not equally likely to be correct. As a result, through training life and death problems, playing lots of games, and generally getting experience with a variety of shapes and situations, the initial selection of moves becomes better.

Someone who just learned the rules of go, having a strong capacity for holding variations in their mind, might very well be able to read a good number of moves wide and deep. But the moves they are choosing to read are unlikely to be very good, and it's unlikely that they'll end up with a good result, even if they read, say 15~20 sequences - they were just all the wrong sequences.

In contrast, a pro player has the intuition and instinct to play a most-likely-to-be-correct move almost instantly, without really "reading" deep or wide.

In some sense, a player's "reading" also includes the training they've already done, which allows them to choose better moves - and as a result, they don't have to really iterate as many sequences in their mind while they're actually playing a game in order to get to the right move.

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be immersed

There was a study done at some point that came to the conclusion that chess players read the most (that is, have the greatest number of nodes in their search tree) at expert level (probably the equivalent of 1-2d in go). Weaker players didn't have the ability to read more than that, and masters didn't need to because they did so much pruning, and didn't painstakingly consider and discard moves and variations that they could tell were irrelevant.

This makes sense if you think of reading variations as a tree. A pro can just go from the trunk to the top, if we argue that the top of the tree is the right move. An amateur takes detours at lower branches and spends time reading through the twigs that a pro passes over getting to the higher branches, close to the correct move.

I've come to this conclusion myself - where I think my opponent's move might be is very often not what actually happens

I'm using the "analyse game" function on OGS with enthusiasm, but I think I don't see the best moves.

However it is interesting that, when playing against myself with the analyse function, I find it much easier to kill my own groups than my opponent's.
I think this shows that my opponent has the better/stronger position.

(Does one say "opponent"?)

Yes, your entire comment was perfect idiomatic English.

Sure. And at the very start of the game as black, I'm "reading" 361 branches, right?

I feel like there should be different English words to distinguish between move selection guided by intuition or logic, and consciously considering alternatives that aren't brought about immediately by intuition. Maybe it's a part of visualization. Or maybe we could call it "iteration"? Or maybe "calculation"?

I'd like to allow the term "reading" to include shortcuts or heuristics obtained through intuition and/or other means, since that's often what happens at higher levels of play.

_________________
be immersed

361 factorial. Good luck!

Well, only 55, right?

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Bill is talking about symmetry --- all rotations and reflections are equivalent. The only unique point for the first move is the center point. All others at least four equivalents and most have eight.

However simple it may be, reducing search space for symmetry is a form of heuristic, reducing search space like we've been discussing - isn't it?

Anyway, I'm just joking about the whole thing - the main thing I'd like to say is that it'd be good to distinguish between the conscious calculation that can happen during reading vs. intuition, shortcuts, heuristics, and logic/knowledge based shortcuts that happen during the process of "reading".

_________________
be immersed