And you will make shodan sometime before the sun grows cold...if you play at least 100 games per day.

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100 games per day? Wow, I might as well shoot myself now. Kidding. But I dunno, I've reached 8k pretty fast for how much effort I've put into go. I mean, I've had at least 3 months with very little activity. If I actually took improving more seriously than I do, I think I could improve to an amazing degree. But that's all speculation. lol I'm not trying to overestimate my ability or potential ability.

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I don't agree with Joaz - back when I was playing regularly on KGS without really studying the rate of progress with about 1 month/stone in the 5-9k range and maybe about 2 months/stone in 3k to 1k (I don't recall the precise times, having been stuck around 4k for a few months but then becoming 1k fairly soon after making 3k).

I don't recall actually actively studying for those months. I was perhaps averaging about 2-3 games per day (probably less because I didn't play as much in real time after 4k).

I'm glad you're calling them instincts rather than intuitions. One of my pet peeves is that "intuition" has become a synonym for "instinct", i.e., a thought that is almost completely divorced from the object of thought, when in fact the Latin intuitio refers to gazing, staring at, focusing on an object - which is why (iirc) it also refers to thinking about something, in general. How intuition acquired its current connotation is a bit of a mystery to me.

Anyway, back to go: an intuitive style, properly speaking, would involve spending a long time staring at the board, absorbing all of its features and nuances, like the fact that that group has three liberties, these stones are weak, those stones aim to expand there, and so on. You spend a while focusing on, intuiting, becoming absorbed by the board. It's like intuiting a flower, or a painting. "Taking it in at a glance" actually requires a long, highly focused "glance". The opposite style, where you glance at the board and then react based on the first move that pops into your head, would be properly called a reactive or an instinctive style.

I have a definition of "intuition" that is informed by my programming experience. When programming, the majority of the small decisions I make are guided entirely by intuition, and by intuition, I mean I don't decide consciously; I just "know" what's likely to work out best based on some vague patterns and ideas. Then, occasionally, there are some large decisions I need to think through rationally.

However, I could never have this intuition without a great deal of conscious reflection upon what I do, before and after I make intuitive decisions. I look at what my intuition guided me to do and I try to come up with rational reasons why my intuition was good, bad, or mixed. I use this reflection to decide which parts of my intuition are good, and which parts are bad, and to form new intuitions using what I learn.

The same is true for me in Go. I play most moves mostly by intuition, because I don't play games that are long enough to read all the time. But if I played my games without any reading or without reviewing carefully and reading in the review, all my intuitions would be bad and they would not reliably get better. The primary process by which I improve is using the time after the game to observe my intuition and refine it.

Your mileage may vary!

You're several hundred years too late, unfortunately. The original definition you refer to has been obsolete for quite a while according to the OED. As for how it got here, it seems to have passed through this definition (still current) on its way to similar lay meanings:



I think it does differ from "instinct" though, in that it seems to require there to have been actual apprehension or knowledge or insight, whereas instinct need not.

On the go topic, seeing interesting possibilities and ruling out uninteresting ones quickly is surely desirable, as then your reading can focus on the interesting ones. I don't know that blitz should help more than any other activity with developing this sort of pruning.

I basically agree with everything you said except that (like prokofiev) I think fighting the common usage of a word is rather pointless. Hundreds of millions of English speakers have already unconsciously ruled against you... Your distinctions are useful and interesting, so make up new terms for them.

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Whoops. You're right, I totally used the wrong word and didn't even think about it. Valid point. You're right, I did mean instinctual play.

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Actually, the scholastic use is still the one I have in mind. Keep in mind that what they mean by "immediate" isn't immediate like "A whiskey ginger, and make it snappy," id est instantaneous, but immediate as in "lacking a medium." But I'm almost positive that intuition acquired its colloquial sense before it lost its technical sense.



The new term I have chosen is... drum-roll please... "intuition," derived from the Latin intuitio.

I agree with you in general about bowing before popular usage, but when you're opposed to an attitude rather than to a word, per se, you can't just invent a new language and go off and talk to yourself in the corner. If you think the planets revolve in perfect circles around the Earth and I think they revolve in ellipses about the Sun, I won't resolve our agreement by calling the things that revolve in circles planets and the things that revolve in ellipses anetplays. At the end of the day our dispute is still about cosmology, not grammar. Likewise my distinctly minority position on the meaning of the word "intuition" is ultimately about the status of reflection, and letting people run together "guess", "hunch", "gut feeling", "instinct", "reflex", "snap judgment" and goodness knows what else under the dignified title of "intuition" is too much of a concession to the enemy.

OK, for better terms, we can switch to more objective ones. Read the sample of this book. But read the rest of this post FIRST (I give a quiz that everyone here will want to take!).

"System 1" is automatic, unconscious thinking:



"System 2" is conscious, effortful processing: (read the rest of the sample on the page I linked above for better definitions AFTER you read the rest of this post).



I left out an item in one of the above two lists. It is: "Find a strong move in chess (if you are a chess master)." Which list would you expect it to be in?

Hint:

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I'm almost a chess master and the answer is obviously system 1. System 1 is how you come up with candidate moves; you see a shortlist of moves that "look good." System 2 is how you determine which candidate move is best.

How can that be surprising if you play Go? Isn't it the same process? It's the same process for me (although I'm not obviously not nearly as good at Go.)

cata, in retrospect it is indeed painfully obvious. But I'll be surprised (again!) if I'm the only person here that finds that surprising...

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It's not clear from context what exactly they mean by "find a strong move". If they mean that everything that's going on in a grandmaster's skull during a match is system one (in other words, what happens when GM's are finding the strongest move?), yes, I find that very surprising. I would have expected something more like cata's two-stage process. Otoh, if they mean everything that happens before the GM says "hmm, what about this move, this looks interesting", then it's not surprising.

While I would agree that the great majority of plays are identified this way (especially true in my case!), I would claim that one of the things that separates the title holders from the also rans is the ability to "dig in", if you will, and go beyond the short list. I do not think that Yamashita and Iyama in the recent 2-day Meijin title match games, for example, spent all their time just evaluating the relative merits of the plays that were intuitively obvious. So it is quite possible that Prof. Kahneman and I would disagree on the definition of "strong" in this context.

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I think they must mean something akin to cata's two-stage (which, btw, sounds like a great martial-arts-inspired swing-y dance step).

The truth is, you rarely ever find moves by brute-force analysis. You find moves and then do brute force analysis on them. So while it is technically two-stage, the actual "finding" is divorced from stage 2.

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Personally, I find that finding sensible candidate moves is very hard for me in Go. I find that a large portion of my losses are because at some crucial moment I was unable to even identify as interesting the moves which were best -- a shape point in the middle of an enemy mass, an attachment that I have not seen before, an opportunity to hane and make a ko, a particularly resilient formation for myself.

However, I'm optimistic, since it's easy to get better at that part; just take one or two of the patterns you didn't see, think hard and roll them around in your head until you have a handle you can understand them with, and then remember them for next time.

Anyone interested in a perspective on the process of analysis should probably check out Alexander Kotov's famous book "Think Like A Grandmaster" which discusses in depth how to successfully find, analyze, and evaluate moves in chess. I suspect that it will be interesting even if you have very little chess background; much cross-disciplinary advice is presented. Let me give two brief excerpts:

On amateurish analysis (do I ever empathize with this one!)



On how to study pro games:

Yeah, System 1 produces candidates, and System 2 considers.

But if you think about it, System 1 is doing most of the work. To go from 300+ candidates to a handful of reasonable ones is a *much* bigger decision than going on to pick the best out of that handful. (And it applies recursively, too-- when reading, you only evaluate moves and responses produced by System 2. Only rarely do you methodically examine every combination-- there's not enough time.) This implies that if you want to be really good, you need your System 1 to understand go really well. I'm thinking that much of what we do to study--problems, pro game review, et cetera--is actually aimed at training System 1.

So, since reading that excerpt a few weeks ago (I intend to read the book eventually), I've tried, in some positions, just staring at the board without much conscious thought, in an effort to get System 1 to produce more candidate moves, which seems to work a little bit-- if your problem is lack of candidates (and if you spend all your time thinking about one or two moves, then it may be a problem you didn't know you had ).

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
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Simply looking at the whole board helped me considerably when I was about 11 kyu. At your level, I do not know how much good it will do. However, I suspect that when pros have the time, they spend some of it just looking.

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Bill, it may be that much of the benefit comes just from slowing down. Also, I've been pausing in my reading and asking, "...ok, but would I play that if I were him?" and often the answer is, "... of course not!" Apparently System 1 can change its mind when you ask it a different question...



Some more random thoughts:

To get an idea of the amount of work System 1 performs for you, consider the case where you read a few lines 12 moves deep. Say you're inhumanly good at reading and consider 3 followups to every single move (so you consider 3^12 ~= 500,000 positions). Then System 1 contributes about 80 bits to your decision, and System 2 contributes about 17 bits to your decision. This is an enormous overestimate of how much System 2 contributes; typically I only read a couple lines that deep, nothing like 500,000. If I get that deep for about 20 lines (still an overestimate, but I read lots of lines only a couple moves deep), then System 1 is doing ~94 bits of work, and System 2 is doing 4-5 bits of work.

Say that System 2 evaluates 30 positions per minute (2 seconds per position). Then, in one minute, System 2 does 5 bits of work. In 5 minutes of thinking, System 2 could see 5*30 = 150 positions, nearly 8 bits of work. In one hour of thinking, System 2 could see 30*60 = 1800 postions, or almost 11 bits of work. I don't think anybody's System 2 operates much faster than this (2 or 4 times the speed, fine-- more would astonish me). Pros and amateurs alike. The large difference, then, must be how much work their System 1 does. If a 6 dan can read 20 moves ahead, their System 1 is doing something on the order of 160 bits of work. This explains why it's no effort for them to beat me; their System 1 does vastly more work than my Systems 1 and 2 together. They don't even have to get System 2 involved. If a pro can read 25 moves ahead, they're doing ~200 bits of work, more than the 6 dans can ever hope to do.

(On the "bits" I refer to above: the difficulty of a decision can be thought of as how many bits of information it takes to locate it within the search space. For example, if the problem is to identify a particular person on the planet, you need log2(7 billion) ~= 33 bits of information. If you know their gender, that's 1 bit (it eliminates half the population). If you know they're in New York, that's 10 more bits of information-- it only takes log2(8.7 million) ~= 22 bits of information to locate a person in New York. Every bit halves the space you have left to search. For comparison, if you needed 97 bits to locate someone on earth, that would imply that there were 2^97 people on the planet; if that were the case-- each person would have less than a square micrometer to live in. And yes, I just discovered how cool http://www.wolframalpha.com/ can be...)

(ETA: Huh, on my other computer in whatever font is being used, squiggles (~) look like minus signs (-). I'm talking about approximate bits, not negative bits above!)

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
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Yeah, I love that site.

Also, nice breakdown concerning System 1 and System 2 work bits. I like the way you played it out.