This feels an awful lot like telling white, fine, you can have the bottom, and strengthening him, which really hurts your potential there. And, I thought you watched my last video about aji-keshi.

Who knows, you might be right, and I might be completely wrong, but if your goal is surrounding territory, you have another direction you can move in, without helping white.

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- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

Why do you exclude (implicitely) that "your goal is surrounding territory" might be applied to White ?
Just because it is "Black to play" ?

Probably one has to consider that (some of) White's three stones at right (may be after a correct sequence that is unknown to me) might not be optimally placed for surrounding an APPROPRIATE amount of White territory ?

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Igo Hatsuyōron #120 (really solved by KataGo)

Just to clarify, Daal said that was his goal, not me. I was just pointing out that he may be able to play in another direction and accomplish that same goal, without helping white on the bottom.

My answer, in the previous post, is more about the stones going walking. It seems to me that black has more to lose by abandoning the stroll first. White's bottom is just too vague for me.

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- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

To me, this is a moyo boundary battle and it's all about getting ahead. Therefore, I would play "A" (P10), consider a white invasion in the top right and a black one in the on the lower side to be miai and leave it at that. I should be pretty clear by now that I can't predict white's moves anyway. Perhaps this is hard to feel if intuition comes from pro games, because white has made the relatively uncommon O4 approach. Also, Q8 feels a bit forced and may therefore be a mistake. Instead of Q8, I may play "B" (P8) or O3. It is because of this feeling of already being forced that P10 looks so urgent to me. Is any case, it is intolerable to let white get there first. This is a game of chicken and black is already flinching slightly, but it's still a game.

Not following the conversation closely, but I like J3.

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Just for the board being analysed, my intuition is G4 but on reflection I want to play Q2.

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As a followup to my intuition post, my thinking would want me to play Q2 so I can get a lot of potential 4th line points on the right. If white walks ahead of me I don't care and I can reduce the bottom which he's not making much of and if he tries to plop down a stone there it's still a pretty big, vague area that I didnt' care about in my instinct move.

Here is a summary of Kim Sujun's opinion on the book position shown above, along with my own impressions when first looking at it. My framework is intuition and conscious thinking.

As a reminder, here is the position but now with the two options presented by Kim shown - A and B for Black.



As I've said, my initial impression of the position was that it was very odd. That intuition proved to be spot on. The whole-board position has never appeared in the GoGoD database. The lower-right quadrant has only appeared four times but in each case deep in the middle game with White strength to the left, making the three-stone White wall the last element in a surrounding tactic, not the building of thickness.

The bit I found odd was the White wall. It's hard to say whether it's thickness yet. It is peepable and, since it starts on the fourth line, it has no base. Rather than usual opening thickness, it resembles more the proto-thickness you get from erasing moves much deeper in the game. Black's area on the right is not territory yet - it's just a showcase for aji.

So, looking at B, it could be argued that it is sente, helping to firm up the right side and it prevents White from attaching at Q3, which could likewise be sente and would give White's wall a bit of a base. But my intuition told me pros just don't make those sorts of moves this early. The Black gain in the corner is outweighed by strengthening White over the whole board. My intuition proved to be right again.

Turning to A, I instantly assumed White would pincer it - intuition 100% right again, as it turned out.

But that left me with a choice of two moves I did not want to play. So I then switched to conscious reasoning. Part of that was assembling in my mind a group of factors likely to be relevant. I could easily rattle off concepts like sente, aji, pincers, thickness, as I have already done, and could add waffle about moyos, balance and a quite a few other things. I could even toss in stuff like what the Japanese call yakimochi moves - jealous or envious moves. In other words, I could look at the lower side and say, "Well, if I'm not going to get it, he sure as hell isn't either" and so I could play a disruptive move there. But at the same time I know that such moves lead to weak groups, weak groups require defensive moves that don't contribute to territory, and the biggest flaw in all amateur games is that they make far too many moves that don't contribute to territory. The upshot of all this conscious reasoning was that it didn't help. It just left me more confused.

The next step was conscious reasoning, too. What's this book about? Surrounding territory. Only B seems to do that, so B must be the answer. I chose it, but with great misgivings. It turned out conscious reasoning had let me down again.

Now it did occur to me (intuition again) that this problem may have been about White surrounding territory, but conscious thought dispelled that - the book's full title is "The four basics in surrounding territory efficiently." I'm a trusting soul and couldn't see how that would properly fit with giving White territory. As it turned out: yet again, intuition 1 - conscious reasoning 0.

The sequence Kim had in mind was initially 1 to 14 the following diagram.



In that final position, Black can also look forward to the sequence starting with A (A now, note - not B). The result is that he has forced White to surround territory but in an overconcentrated and small way. Obviously you are meant to take from this that this is a good strategic weapon to add to your armoury. It is reinforced by looking at the alternative - defending the lower-right corner in sente, i.e. B in the original diagram, and then switching to A there - next diagram.



This is the only time when my intuition let me down a little. I had sloppily assumed, without any thought, that White would then pincer. Perhaps he still can, but Kim's move for White is then a submarine attack. I have to confess, though, that while intuition let me down, I'm not sure I would have come up with the submarine attack even after conscious thought. My intuitions that pros don't play second-line moves this early and that Black has too much room to settle himself might have proven too strong. Of course I also have the intuition that these Black stones can easily become yakimochi, or even mochikomi, but the weighting on that element of my intuition is noticeably lower.

The next position in the book is the one that results where White does pincer in the above diagram, so we do get to see why the pincer is not White's best option. Several continuations are shown but I'll give one just to satisfy curiosity.



My conclusion from this little exercise is that my intuition was almost perfect and my conscious reasoning (or gullibility, if you prefer) scored zero, both in evaluating the position and choosing the next move. Although I can list a very large number of potentially relevant strategic elements consciously, I believe that conscious thought is not likely to be useful in such positions in actual games. Its main use would be in study, where it would help bolster my intuition. Although I am exaggerating, I think it's reasonable, for amateurs at least, to say that actual play is about intuition + reading and study is about conscious thought + examples. The only problem with that formula, if you are like me, is that usually reading = 0.

I also concluded, incidentally, that Kim (or his ghost writer) is not the best go writer in the business, but I still think this is a fascinating and very useful book, though almost certainly requiring a good reading knowledge of Japanese (and, as you have seen, it certainly requires knowledge of the causative!).

By way of a little extra review, therefore, the book will enable you to choose the correct option in the following positions also, and enable you to understand why - and in terms of surrounding territory rather than fighting (VERY useful). No options are offered for the second example. Black to play in both.





My intuition tells me that amateurs which find these sorts of positions rather familiar

QUOTE from http://www.chess.com/news/long-lost-fis ... hours-2843



That site also mentions that the youngest US chess master is now 9. Both he and the previous holder have Chinese names. The top US chess player, Nakamura, is of Japanese ancestry. So it's not only in go that people with Oriental names seem to be moving top of the pile... A Chinese GM has recently moved into the chess Elo top ten by the way, and the best female player is Chinese, I gather.

Thanks for the problem and answer John. Daal may have had the wrong answer, but at least his, unlike mine, was one a pro would consider.

_________________
- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

While I know you're using a bit of hyperbole, I think you're falling into the same trap as Robert. He has spent most of his go playing career attempting to articulate rational principles for play, so he probably relies on conscious thought much more than the average 5-dan. You've spent a tremendous amount of time looking at professional games, so your intuition for a good move is probably far more developed than most amateurs' feel for the game. You're each at an extreme of the reasoning / intuition spectrum, so I suspect that the thought processes of most people will fall somewhere in between. I don't think that studying conscious principles (even for use in a game situation) or developing one's intuition are mutually exclusive, though I suspect each of us leans toward one or the other.

Incidentally, I'm interested to see if the development of a professional system in Western Go might lead to people who perform at a similarly high level as Asian professionals but arrive there via a different path. We often talk about how professionals approach / study the game, but is their approach descriptive (this is how they happen to do it) or prescriptive (this is what must be done to reach that level)? Is there one path to good Go or are there many paths?

There is interesting research in the field of cognitive psychology that can shed a little more light on this discussion. Some of this has been mentioned elsewhere on this forum, but I think there are some interesting connections to daal's initial question. The article Visual Span in Expert Chess Players: Evidence From Eye Movements provides further evidence for "chunking" (which John has discussed at length elsewhere). This quote was representative of the initial hypothesis they were testing:



They authors found eye movements to support this hypothesis, and in fact strengthen it: "Our study extends these findings by showing that experts have an advantage in extracting perceptual information in an individual fixation."

I think this is a big part of what we are talking about when we discuss "intuition" in go: at a fundamental, perceptual level expert players do not see the board in the same way as beginners. This is obviously trained from a lot of inputs and is distinct from understanding principles of the game. In fact, humans are generally bad at giving a rational description of how their perception works. So our decisions about a board state involve two steps: perceptual encoding and rational use of those perceived "chunks".

So why is our intuition wrong? Part of the answer is not enough exposure, as several have already mentioned. (And John has ably demonstrated the value of LOTS of exposure to good go.) But I think there is another issue, too: intuition pumps. Once we've extracted information from a problem description (or go board state) our brains can generate intuitive answers and / or approaches to finding a solution. But sometimes there are elements of the problem (or board) that can lead us to an incorrect intuitive response, and once we've started down that path it is difficult to see the problem differently.

I think this is part of what happens to us amateurs: we extract the wrong perceptual information from the scene, or the combination of features make us entertain the wrong type of move. The go board acts as an "intuition pump" that blinds us to the right move, even if the principles that would lead us to select that move are resident in memory. I think there are at least two solutions to this problem. The first to try to suppress the intuitive response in order to make sure that we can apply the rational principles without bias. This seems to be the approach that Robert advocates, and why he is able to insist that intuition does not play a large role in his play. The second approach would be to train our intuition to more often select the right move (or type of move). This method takes advantage of our mind's ability to generate a lot of information about the scene at a perceptual level. I don't think either approach is necessarily wrong, and I expect that perception and rational assessment will develop in tandem for most players.