Quote:
O Meien's and Antti Törmänen's endgame books fail because both heavily rely on mathematics
O Meien's book does NOT rely heavily on mathematicw, or even slightly. He mentions a little bit of arithmetic (which is usually distinguished from mathematics in normal English in the same way that running for the bus is not the same as what Usain Bolt does). I'm guessing you haven't read the book and just looked at the pictures, and are relying on spotting trivia such as (5 + {-1}) ÷ 2 = 2. But in the actual text he laughs this away: "What I am saying is ending up sounding like an elementary-school arithmetic lesson!"
And O Meien's book certainly does not fail: it taught me a LOT, and it has the Bill Spight seal of approval. What higher praise can there be? (However, for me Antti's book did fail miserably. Not because of mathematics (was there any?). I just found he lacked enough experience of teaching or writing.)
But your reply just confirms my point. While I can sincerely thank you for taking the time to reply, I can't say that I see any unbending to accommodate yourself to a potential audience. The mathematical techniques are not the problem. I was actually very good at maths at school, but only in the sense of passing exams. I even tried to take an interest to the extent of studying engineering and advanced maths privately and passing exams privately. I have had to deal with VERY advanced maths in foreign languages, as a technical translator for 50 years. By the very nature of technical papers and patents which peers in other countries are interested in, they are at the leading edge of their technologies. I have read Berlekamp's book. I have bought and tried to read yours.
Maths itself is not the problem. Mindset is. I do not think like a mathematician. And I do not want to, even though I bought a thick book called "How to think like a mathematician" and it is still in my tsundoku pile."
I think like a native English speaker. There are millions (billions?) of us. And what I say here applies to all other human languages. We all share the characteristic that we are intimately familiar with our own language, with its ambiguities and other foibles, and with other people's linguistic foibles. What we are not familiar with, unless we have the mindset of a mathematician, is English distorted into a parody of itself by misguided attempts to turn our supremely useful, beautiful, varied, rich and entertaining native tongues into mathemicalese. Or logicese. (See how easily I can invent two daft words with the total confidence that everyone will understand me.) Where you see 'count' as a problem because it has two meanings, we can retort that it actually has many more meanings and we don't have a problem with any of them. Where you see a hiccup because I, say, temporarily take a word in a meaning you didn't intend, I see a learning opportunity, because in resolving that hiccup Instead of restricting myself, effectively and unnaturally forcing myself to think of only one definition, I am making associations and stretching boundaries, broadening my total knowledge. I want a high R number for the knowledge virus in my brain. That's normal. It's not just me. It's not just go. We all drive cars. It would be a real mess if we all restricted ourselves to staring fixedly at the steering wheel all the time, just because steering is so important. Driving is actually a much better and safer experience if we also change gears, look out the window, wave to a friend, take a slurp of pop, turn on the radio, remember to put petrol in t he tank, etc etc, using the full panoply of our neurons. After all, the human brain is still capable of much, much more than AlphaGo. Your readers are capable of much more.
Mindset, perspective. Call it what you will. But just listen to the MAJORITY of your potential readership. Engage with them in their own language, where ambiguities are actually very useful.
Allow me to give a specific example that occurred a few days ago. I was talking with a daughter about her son applying for university. To get into the best nowadays you need a strategy. She sent a text saying "Yeah, I agree, you can’t overthink the college selection." What she was agreeing to was me saying "You can overthink the college selection." My instant reaction was that she had made a mistake. But I very soon realised that was going on, in posh linguistics terms, was a coincidentally different surface manifestation of two valid underlying transformations with the same semantic origin. In normal English, I was stressing the OVERthink, she was stressing the MUSTN’T. We were actually, as near as dammit, in complete synch. If she had said "can overthink" like me, I wouldn't have hiccupped and that conversation would have probably stopped right there and been forgotten. But because of the hiccup, and resolving it, we talked in more depth, saw additional perspectives, kept the topic interesting and alive, and as a result talked about it again yesterday, with more people present and so eliciting even more knowledge and awareness of selection strategy.
Ogawa/Davies and O Meien work beautifully at that level of c=engaging creatively through normal language. No other book I know of does.