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[go]$$W Move 235
$$ ---------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . . . 6 4 B O O . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . O X X . 7 . 5 3 X O O . . O O O X . |
$$ | . O O X . . . . . X X O O O X . X X . |
$$ | . O X X . X . . . , X X O X . X X O . |
$$ | . X O . X . X . . . . X X O X X O . . |
$$ | . X O X . X . X . X X X X O X O . O . |
$$ | X . X X X O X X X O X O X O O . O . . |
$$ | . X X X O O O O X O O O O O . O O O . |
$$ | . X X O . . O . X X O . . O X O X X O |
$$ | X . X O O O X O X O . . O X . X X O . |
$$ | O X X O O X X O X O . O O X X . X O . |
$$ | O O O . O X X O O . . X O X . X O O O |
$$ | . . . O O X O O . . . . X O X X X O X |
$$ | . . O X X X X O . . . . . O O O O O X |
$$ | . . O X . X O . . . . . . O X X . O X |
$$ | O O O X X O O . . , . . . O O X X X X |
$$ | O X X . X X O O . . . . . O X X . O 2 |
$$ | X X . . X . X O . . . . . 1 O X X O X |
$$ | . . . . . X X O . . . . . O X X . O . |
$$ ---------------------------------------[/go]

After , makes seki.

Then captures .

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

I agree!

_________________
我が道を行く。
I'll do it my way....

Going through a bad patch at the moment but a bit more clear headed this evening so: On playing whilst depressed:

If you're like me, you get cognitively impaired when depressed. Your memory, attention span and concentration are all poorer. This makes for some very lacklustre go. There's also a strong tendency towards passivity in me when depressed both socially and on the go board. It's like you're several stones weaker all of a sudden. The effort you'd put in previously into improving your reading or whatever becomes meaningless as you're working with a more limited mental capacity for concentration, i.e. reading which is what go at my level really comes down to. My mood is reactive whilst depressed, it can brighten and improve but the concentration problems stay put, so while I'm still able to enjoy a game of go at times my play is dire. This is greatly frustrating because it's yet another part of my life that this illness has found a way to screw with. But I got some good advice from topazg, just enjoy laying down the stones until the storm passes, so that is effectively my plan. I'm going to keep playing despite my play sucking, I'll keep doing problems despite me finding previously easy problems hard and I'll keep going to the club and trying to keep social contacts going. I won't expect reviews of my depressed games, too often it'll be a case of "what the hell were you thinking?" with moves. I'll merely post the odd one I find interesting or to show what depressed go can look like for people.

In short, I'm giving myself permission to play crap go and have fun doing it and not beat myself up over the fact that I'm playing poorly. They say when depressed that you should show yourself compassion (well, they say this in general), and I suppose this is my effort at doing this in this sphere of my life. This depression will pass, hopefully before March, and I can get back to worrying about improving once that happens. Until then I might as well keep playing as this has become a game that I love despite its unforgiving nature when it comes to concentration.

Lack of sleep, exhaustion, bad mood, or otherwise general hiccups in real life easily do this to me, too.

I`m having the same feelings, Padraig. Well, I`m not depressed, but I do have anxiety problems, and this affects my go severely. IMO, the most important go skill is being able to view and assess the position objectively, but when your emotions are playing up, it`s next-to-impossible. You`re not alone, and you have my complete sympathy.

Still, you have good friends. It seems you and Tom have both friendship and rivalry, and you`re getting other people into the game, too. Don`t underestimate the value of those things!

_________________
Learn the "tea-stealing" tesuji! Cho Chikun demonstrates here:

Anxiety is awful, you have my deepest sympathies. I get bad bouts of it and paranoia when low and they can persist into my well periods for quite some time. My psychologist has me doing "opposite action", i.e. simply just doing the thing that I'm being anxious over doing to try and show myself that it won't go all bad and hopefully my brain cops on that there's no threat there. Being objective when either anxious or depressed, well, that's a very tricky one. Doing it for a simple task like feeding yourself is hard enough, maintaining it for 1-2 hours over a go game? Close to impossible for me anyway when substantially low.

I agree completely with you on the value of those other things.

Didn't have much to say about Thursday, played a relative beginner who wanted to play even. No go today because of the Jazz Festival meaning the city is packed and our usual haunts too busy for us to take up a few tables.

I picked up "Chess for Zebras" on Kindle and am reading it and finding it very interesting. I'm not really at a place where the book is aimed (I haven't been playing for years and found myself stuck at a particular rank) but I find the the pedagogy and psychology talked about interesting enough anyway and as an adult learner of this game much of the problems are relevant for me even now I think.

Reverting back to chess I see.

_________________
我が道を行く。
I'll do it my way....

Not at all! A quite esteemed member of this forum recommended it as one of the best go improvement books out there.

It's about why adults hit walls and find it very hard to improve in chess despite studying plenty and so on. From the two chapters that I've read so far it's quite transferable to go.

I'll give an example:

He talks about the difference between "knowledge how" and "knowledge that." To take an example dear to your heart, playing tengen first as black, one of almost any level could amass a lot of "knowledge that" about the advantages and disadvantages of playing tengen first. One could learn off reams of variations related to the opening 20/30 moves. But none of this would necessarily result in one knowing *how* to play after tengen first when taken out of one's playbook. Or to take a non go example, I could read book after book on how to play guitar but until I pick up a guitar and start trying to play it I won't have any "knowledge how." Knowledge how seems to be equated to skill for him, but I may be misrepresenting him here.

He talks about skill versus knowledge. The latter is important no doubt but the former is what really marks the difference in ratings in chess, and by analogy ranks in go. He lists two ways of building skill, playing and working things out for yourself. The former is self explanatory, the latter consists of doing problems, analysing your own games and (for chess) playing won positions against a strong AI (perhaps analogous to one taking extra stones against a familiar opponent?).

Of course the skill part boils down to something that seems to be constantly repeated in go circles to people wanting to improve:

Play a lot.
Do tsumego.


What's interesting about the book is that he's trying to give a pedagogical and psychological framework to support such advice rather than just saying "well it works for that student" or whatever.

Sounds like "experience" to me.Perhaps he means "different levels of understanding".

It's not really experience. The term comes from philosophy of mind, in go terms it'd be the distinction between having seen a particular move in a particular fuseki many times before (experience) and (to some extent) knowing that move, its implications, intention, threats, possibilities etc and how to respond to it in order to further various aims (knowledge how). In guitar terms it's the difference between playing a C chord a thousand times and just knowing how to play a C chord. Experience is crucial in gaining "knowledge how" but it is not in and of itself the same thing.


He differentiates between knowledge and skill thusly: Player A won the game not because the fuseki that was played was decent for black (knowledge) but because he knew how to handle the game position coming out of that fuseki (skill).


Edit: Maybe a better go example for the first one would be in life and death: having seen similar situations before (experience) versus, say, being able to spot it's a shortage of liberties problem on sight (knowledge how). Experience is how you get to the latter but it isn't the latter, a player could have seen dozens or hundreds of shortage of liberties problems before but still not spot them on sight all of the time.

That depends on what you mean by "knowing." (*)
Certainly, if you've never even played a C chord once, you have zero experience of it.
If you play it once, that's a level of experience.
If you play it 1,000 times, that's another level of experience.
5,000 times, another level.
100,000 times, yet another level.

Experience is definitely part of it. Experience is not digital.
There are different levels of experience, as there are different levels of understanding.
We are talking about the same thing.

------------
(*) I don't know how to play a C chord on a guitar (or on any other instrument, for that matter. )
If I search online and read that, oh, you put these particular fingers
at these particular positions, then you move your fingers a certain way,
"that's how you play a C chord" -- after I read that, if someone asks me
whether I "know" how to play a C chord, I'd say no.
If I've played a C chord 5,000 times, and asked the same question, I say "I know a little."
After 100,000 times, same question, I still say, "I know a little."
It depends on what you mean by "knowing."

Experience is knowledge gained from doing something.
Knowledge how is the knowledge as to how to do something.

They're different.

Yes, and no. They are on a continuum.
That's what I meant by experience (different levels of it); and understanding (different levels of it).

Understanding is comprehension of something though it's different again to know-how. I disagree they're on a continuum, I think experience and know-how while linked are distinct and separate things.

I agree with this. Experience is the accumulation of "seen-before"-ness, whereas know-how is the accumulation of "I-know-how-to-do-this"-ness.

I suppose in this sense they are on a continuum, the accumulation thereof.

This book sounds quite interesting.

_________________
我が道を行く。
I'll do it my way....

Free today? I could show it to you if you let me beat you again.

Just my two cents: as you know, I like reading books very, very much. But I no longer expect to get substantially wiser, smarter or stronger immediately after reading one. Rather, it feels like books give you the raw material to go out and learn. They give you lots of ideas, facts and methods, but to make them your own you have to try them out for yourself.

I like the guitar analogy, because I can relate to it easily: it`s one thing to learn a new chord or scale from a book, but it takes a lot of practicing before that information becomes natural to me.

Books are great and studying is both fun and rewarding, but there`s no escaping the necessity of having to experience the learning

_________________
Learn the "tea-stealing" tesuji! Cho Chikun demonstrates here: