How about just playing the practical move.

The reason for my move: It works.

Mistakes in rational choice by amateurs often occur through taking isolated aspects of something and moving it away from it's practical effect and towards a general idea of the whole being good or bad depending on one part.

I feel the use of checking our reasoning can be found in the meditative schools of Kyūdō— shin-zen-bi, truth-goodness-beauty.

It says an empty true mind naturally hits the target.

So making sure a good method is used to find out what should work and get it to should improve one's accuracy and speed .

edit: I left out half of the first sentence. Whoops.

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On Go proverbs:
"A fine Gotation is a diamond in the hand of a dan of wit and a pebble in the hand of a kyu" —Joseph Raux misquoted.

True, it's not the conscious mind, but rather the subconscious -- the deep neural net after 10,000 hours of efficient training -- that hits the target.

Yes , I often feel like there are many ways to go wrong, and the entire purpose of practice is to make all the mistakes you may, so that your subconscious can register them and avoid them automatically. A bit like building immunity to different mistakes.

So in archery, the concept of hitting the target seems straightforward. But in practice, there are so many ways to not hit the target, and the closer a shot that misses seems to one that will actually hit it, the more likely you are to mistaken it for a shot that's successful.

In physical sports, there are many mistaken movements, and in mindsports, there are many mistaken plays but AI can self-play for millions of games and make all the mistakes that it needs to .

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On Go proverbs:
"A fine Gotation is a diamond in the hand of a dan of wit and a pebble in the hand of a kyu" —Joseph Raux misquoted.

I mentioned earlier the word "perception" as a word that came to me after being reminded of Gestalt psychology and that seemed apposite to go. I have pursued the word a little further and it now seems even more fecund in its applications to go.

It seems that one of the key elements of perception is the human ability to infer: to fill in information that is not there. Apparently the experts are not yet sure why we do this, but their best guess is that it's an evolutionary adaptation brought about by the fact that so much of what we see or hear comes to us as incomplete information. Certainly, what most of us see on the go board is a potage of incomplete information! We'd love to adapt!

A classic example of perception seems to be Kanizsa's illusion:



We "see" a white triangle imposed on a black one, but in reality there are no triangles in the figure.

My guess is that this resembles what is going on on the go board with this importance difference: pros see the triangles, we amateurs see only the Pacmen. My starting point for this guess is something I realised about go quite a long time ago, and for me it was the most important insight I've ever had into go. It didn't make me stronger (and as to why I'll mention that later) but it allowed me to appreciate the game at a much higher level. The insight was this: go is supposed to be the surrounding game; pros play the surrounding game; amateurs play the counting game. Or, to repeat the comments on the figure: pros see the triangles spanning the whole board, we see the Pacmen territories in the corners and on the side.

Or, to belabour the point a little, amateurs think surrounding applies just to countable territories whereas pros realise that you can surround abstract things like influence.

Always assuming my insight was on the right lines, why didn't it make me stronger? I think it's because you only learn to "see" (infer) the
ley lines if you put in the notorious 10,000 hours.

That then raises the question as to what benefit the ley lines give the pros. I think the answer lies in the very important remark Bill made earlier on: reading (calculation) is best used for confirmation of ideas we come up with first.

No-one can read out everything. We approximate by using tricks to prune the tree. Every player beyond a Day 1 beginner has experienced this. You look at a tsumego problem and if you try to work out every move on a "if he plays there I play here" basis, you soon run into the sand. But if you recognise a shape (e.g. a space where you can play a nakade) you can choose the right move instantly, just performing one or two lines of analysis to make sure there's nothing hidden there, such as a possible seki.

In other words, if you have a specific goal in mind you can read ahead much further and more easily. My guess is that pros can do this for areas way beyond the scope of tsumego and also beyond the scope of josekis and middle game josekis. They can do it for the whole board because they can see the invisible ley lines there. AI bots are effectively doing the same, but even more reliably.

I believe that counting - the be all and end all for many amateurs - is likewise just another confirmation tool for a pro, and again they can use it in the centre of the board in ways amateurs can't.

Obviously I've no personal experience of how to become really strong at go, but everything I read (or infer!) points to building up perception or something like it by playing over countless pro games. That's certainly what the pros have done. Some amateurs I know have tried this and often claim it doesn't work. Some desperately try to memorise pro games and even more say that doesn't work. I believe that's because they think it will work by osmosis.

The way to make it work is by effortful practice. T Mark Hall's now famous experience of improving two grades just by playing over the games of Go Seigen was an example of that. The point is that he was transcribing the games into sgf files from densely packed diagrams. He had to be "effortful" to find the next move on the diagram without scanning every line. He learned to look in the right area of the diagram to find the next move. That alone made him stronger. He was, if you like, laying down ley lines.

Not everyone wants to transcribe games as a way of becoming stronger, but they can't avoid putting some effort into playing over games. Just thinking about what is really being surrounded, how that little defect on one side of the board can have a tsunami effect on the other side, and things like that, may be a way of learning where the invisible ley lines should be. Details aside, that seems the real rational choice for amateurs here.

Effort is necessary.

Shape (even with very much effort) is terribly bad in tsumego. Two very similar shapes can have very different behaviours. Trying to rely on shape and the like together with only reading a few variations halted my tsumego progress for many years. Suggesting such belongs to the worst possible advices. Only when understanding the method(s) of tactical reading properly, I started making progress in tsumego again. Needless to say, proper tactical reading does not mean reading all variations but means reading all those necessary for the method(s) to produce only correct answers.

Spend your tsumego effort on the necessary tactical reading.

I do wish you'd stop every attempt at a possible discussion by surreptitiously trying to promote your books.

I'm sure others will note that I was not writing about tsumego, nor did I say in my oblique reference to it what you imply I say.

Would you say that amatuers should treat counting as trainer wheels to improve their perception, so they eventually don't need to use it a lot except for verification?



Pros have a broader and more nuanced sense of shape and direction, but I also suspect that they are more competent in using their perception than amateurs are. It probably goes along with telling insei to put their chairs back when they finish a game!

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On Go proverbs:
"A fine Gotation is a diamond in the hand of a dan of wit and a pebble in the hand of a kyu" —Joseph Raux misquoted.

I don't really know, which is why I was trying to get a discussion on perception (NOT tsumego) going.



Part of the problem here is that shape can be either katachi or sugata (and also things like gokei) in Japanese, and English speakers don't make the distinction. I lean towards believing that the more limited go vocabulary in the west inhibits growth of perception. That's something too I would like to see discussed (and NOT tsumego or books).

What about korean or chinese go vocabulary?

I remember a game in the Gu-Lee ten game match that made many an amateur scratch their heads as they thought the result in the lower right corner was too good for one player, but professionals felt it was even. I guess it showed the gap in perception between pros and weaker amateurs.

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On Go proverbs:
"A fine Gotation is a diamond in the hand of a dan of wit and a pebble in the hand of a kyu" —Joseph Raux misquoted.

In your previous message, you wrote about tsumego,...



...discouraged tactical reading, which is using an "if he plays there I play here" basis, and encouraged relying on shape recognition supported with only a few sequences.



Suppose you are right that the go vocabulary in the west is more limited on average. A limited vocabulary can inhibit growth of perception. As can many other factors, including those you might prefer not to discuss, such as tactical reading. Perception is not a one-way street or dominating other skills. Perception can also be trained by practising tactical reading, and perception can be an early filter for tactical reading, especially when considering large parts of the board early during the game.



For this purpose, studying shapes (or tesujis) is very useful.

The recent 10-15 years of international pro tourney results seem to show the Chinese and Korean go vocabularies don't hinder the Chinese or Korean pros. Dunno about amateurs.Likewise between the top engines and top pros.

My question was rather if the Chinese or Korean go vocabulary was as developped and nuanced as the japanese one.

This reminds me of a conversation my wife had in a linguistics class with her professor. At the time, she believed that the Korean word for "jeong" (a word kind of similar to "love", but with various nuances) couldn't be expressed in English, since there wasn't a corresponding concept.

The linguistics professor had a different view: all concepts are expressible between languages, though, it may take more words in some languages. Another popular example is the idea that eskimos have many different words for snow than in English. Does it mean that eskimos can understand snow better simply because of the language?

I don't know. I only have a single native language, so how could I objectively assess? My suspicion is that all things are expressible, but certain languages may be better at explaining certain concepts efficiently. Cultural understanding may be required for certain concepts, too.

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be immersed

Side note for Kirby: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone

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Occupy Babel!

Cool.



I stand corrected

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be immersed

Snowclones?

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Maybe you shouldn't...

'How many Eskimo words for ice?’ Collecting Inuit sea ice terminologies in the International Polar Year 2007–2008

Abstract [emphasis added]

Inuit knowledge of the sea ice environment has been praised by generations of early explorers, arctic travellers, natural scientists, anthropologists, and popular writers. Surprisingly little has been done to systematically document and analyze the richness of the Inuit sea ice nomenclatures until quite recently. This article reviews the history of Inuit (Eskimo) sea ice terminology collection, including efforts undertaken in 2005–2009 for the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007–2008. Altogether, a database of 35 indigenous ice nomenclatures from the Bering Sea to East Greenland has been created, displaying the richness of over 1,500 terms for sea ice in all Inuit/Eskimo languages and most regional dialects, as well as in other indigenous northern languages (Chukchi, Dena’ina Athabascan, and Sámi). Processing these vocabularies, analyzing the origins and historical geography of the Inuit sea ice nomenclatures, and returning the data to participating communities as educational, heritage, and language materials may become one of the lasting contributions of the IPY 2007–2008 program.

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

The Wikipedia page hyperpape linked seems to reference this paper for that bit: https://web.archive.org/web/20170729174 ... conception

I can't claim to have read the paper, though.

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be immersed