[...] I took it upon myself, then, to endeavour to find out how it would be possible to most effectively “build” a new master of Go.

The reader may be interested in this study for two different reasons. If the reader is a player or researcher of skill-based games, this study may well give them new points of view. For players, the study may even give concrete advice on how one could develop their skills further, and on how one could conduct their training more effectively. For non-players, too, the study may have some merit, as it will describe through examples on a general level how one should strive for expertise.

What sort of approach towards the research is he taking (case studies, analysis of traditional training techniques, formal research on learning, something else...)?

First post on l19 for me!

First post on l19 for me!

First post on l19 for me!

Just one small and arguable (i.e. Discuss here) point. The dissertation refers to Fujisawa Rina becoming an expert by qualifying as a pro after six years and so disproving the ten-year rule.

I think it is reasonable to question whether qualifying as a pro makes you an expert. Getting a degree, even first class with honours, does not make you an expert in your field. Pro 1-dan is really just getting a degree, an acknowledgement that you are fit to make a career in this field.

Just one small and arguable (i.e. Discuss here) point. The dissertation refers to Fujisawa Rina becoming an expert by qualifying as a pro after six years and so disproving the ten-year rule.

I think it is reasonable to question whether qualifying as a pro makes you an expert. Getting a degree, even first class with honours, does not make you an expert in your field. Pro 1-dan is really just getting a degree, an acknowledgement that you are fit to make a career in this field.

Traditionally 4-dan has always been seen as more of a level where you can be seen as someone to listen to, no longer a junior doctor but a registrar and not yet a consultant. Getting to 4-dan was the sign that you were actually going to have a career in go and so could get married.

Obviously comparing pro qualification to getting a degree is swampy ground, as the level of competition is such that we need to limit the comparison to elite universities. But it still remains a fact that a degree from an elite university is more of a sign of future promise than of expertise.

First post on l19 for me!

Just one small and arguable (i.e. Discuss here) point. The dissertation refers to Fujisawa Rina becoming an expert by qualifying as a pro after six years and so disproving the ten-year rule.

I think it is reasonable to question whether qualifying as a pro makes you an expert. Getting a degree, even first class with honours, does not make you an expert in your field. Pro 1-dan is really just getting a degree, an acknowledgement that you are fit to make a career in this field.

In other words, the biology of an individual’s brains has a limited importance in the development of expertise. It is more important, for example, how interested the individual is in their domain, or how much time the individual ends up using practising.

[...] that, by being “exposed” to a ten years’ worth of experience, everybody could become an expert. Later studies have consistently showed that when an individual reaches an acceptable level of skill for themselves, additional experience will then yield marginal utility [13, pp. 691]. It is for example easy to find amateur Go players who have played tens of thousands of games, but still play at an intermediate level—and on the other hand, there also exist fast-improving players, who may be called skilful after they have only played a thousand games or so. It is clear that mere time expended in a domain is a bad measure of skill, as the utility of time is not always same.

In Japanese Go schools, as well, deliberate practise is used. Common training consists of the playing of games, their post-analysis, reading of theory books, rote learning of played professional games, and solving of Go problems. Of these, the two last are not very obvious methods of training, but they are given a notably big weight. Rote learning of played professional games is thought to develop a player’s intuition: it increases the number of familiar shapes and sequences contained in a player’s memory, the shapes and sequences then becoming available to call out from the memory for use when needed. Like so, rote learning is effective at improving a player’s global intuition of the Go board, while go problems—meaning situations in which a player is to make a group of Go stones to live or to die in a restricted space—improve a player’s intuition for local situations. The teacher of a Go school often fine-tunes the learning material, depending on the student’s phase of learning.

[...] it has been estimated that an expert of chess or Go should know some 10000-100000 different game patterns [22, pp. 5].

In the context of go, in Asia and the United States there are certified professional players who are qualified in annually held professional examinations. Because the players participating in the examinations on average come from the very top spectrum of amateur players, and because very few players end up qualifying to become professionals, it is justified to call professional go players experts in the game.

Deliberate practise is generally accepted and reliably proven to be one of the most efficient means to learn new skills [13, pp. 601]. As was mentioned in Chapter 3, simple additional experience may not help at all at learning new skills or at improving one’s playing level. In deliberate practise, it is essential that the practise be done in a concentrated mind set, that it be regulated and monitored, and that it involves immediate feedback of the individual’s performance. The feedback may come from a third-party evaluator, or the practiser may provide it for himself, for example by comparing one’s performance to expert performance in a similar situation. In deliberate practise, an individual is given goals and aims that are above his current performance level, and while the individual strives for these, failures and lower-level performance may result on a shorter time span. Individuals striving for expertise may, indeed, see these failures as opportunities to improve. [13, pp 601]. In other words, the crucial factor becomes that the individual actively and constantly strives to improve, and doesn’t end up merely “accumulating more experience” [9, pp. 163]. Quantity doesn’t make up for quality at deliberate practise, either: it has been noted that even when looking at very different domains of expertise, experts usually train for only 4-5 hours a day on average. Too much practise may, depending on the domain, lead to practise injuries or so-called “burnout”. [13, pp. 699].

Getting instruction from a current expert is definitely the easier solution for the student, as by so doing the student delegates the preparation of study material to the expert, and can themselves fully concentrate on the actual practise. With this procedure, the student has the additional advantage of having a third party who will actively monitor their improvement, and give additional guidance and coaching if necessary.

I'm not sure that turning pro makes you an expert, but I find the analogy with degrees unsatisfying - the level of competition required to turn pro makes it a very different environment. There is no naked competition with other prospective Bachelor candidates to get those three available BSc spots. All the candidates can get the degree if they work hard enough and master some basic academic skills (passing exams, writing papers).

As I have obviously been affected by this, it would be interesting to know how to overcome this, or for new players how to avoid this in advance.