RobertJasiek wrote:
The value of research, building on top of prior work, cataloguing, pushing the overall knowledge a step further has a tremendous value not only for the theorists, but also for practical applications. Maybe not always immediately, but surely later. It is the general effect of fundamental research. This is so also for a careful definition of nakade.
This sounds right in principle, but has it been actually demonstrated in the field in question? This is part of my unease about the value of what you do. As you can say is that generally speaking, formal research is a good thing. But what if Go is different, what if in Go formal research does not bring much fruit?
I base that uncertainty mainly on two points:
Point #1:
After all this time, it is absolutely not clear to me what practical value is there in all this. Can I get stronger by reading a formal definition of 'nakade'? You keep saying 'eventually', but it seems 'eventually' never comes... Or if it does, it comes too slow for me to notice. You're at it for what? 20 years? 30? 40? When do you expect to see measurable practical results due to all this research? In general.
Point #2:
The fact that I look at other similar fields. For example: chess. I know a lot of formal research has been done in chess, especially in the old Soviet Union, tremendous amounts of money have been spent, and yet it did not seem to have contributed very much. From what I understand, the high level of play in SU was due mostly to incentives and refining traditional methods, not formal theoretical research. They had tons of paid researchers, formal institutes, and what not. But after all this huge effort spanning decades and backed up by resources of a whole country, it seems that the best and fastest way to learn chess is still the old-fashioned way of rote memorization, examples, tactical problem solving, and simply experience.
I mean - I know you are having fun, but is this research only for the sake of research, or to appease some personal itch you have?
RobertJasiek wrote:
Aims of nakade definition research: I am doing this research, because I am in urgent need for its application when teaching life and death more profoundly than by only repeating known standard examples.
I seriously hope you are not going to roll out your formal definitions when teaching.... No offense.
But that's beside the point here.
RobertJasiek wrote:
Traditional methods: why. There has been (almost) only one method: teaching by examples:) Even you will admit that more methods can be better than only one method. Careful definitions are a means to then develop more methods.
Can I really admit that? Again - this is something that "in general" sounds good, but is it true in this case? What if the traditional method is the best and most efficient? What do we gain by putting so much effort ad resources into developing alternate methods. Maybe if you put all this effort into studying Go the traditional way, you would have been a top pro by now? We will simply never know...
Look at the chess example I gave above.
True, you might say we never know until we try, and you are right. But then the best we can say is: lets try and see how it goes. We cannot say: what we do is extremely valuable and/or important. We simply do not know... yet. Indications seem to go both ways, depending which field of study you look at.
So, back to your statement of me admitting that more methods is better than one. Yes, I can. If we have a cheap choice, if a new method or a bunch of new methods is handed to us, I would say - sure, take it. We lose nothing, even if these methods are not very good or very practical. However - this is not the case here, we are faced with a lot of effort to derive at these new methods (true, not my effort, but still effort) - so in principle, some kind of cost-to-reward analysis would be interesting.
Well - its all moot anyways, because I suspect you are simply having a lot of fun doing all that, and you would do it even if it could be proven that it will never have much practical use. More power to you, I have no problem with that. What I question is you repeatedly stressing how important and valuable it is what you do. I am not saying you are wrong, I am just saying this has not be demonstrated yet.
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RobertJasiek
