In my "road to 3 dan" I'm psyching myself up and have started playing 3 dan opponents. While solidifying the 2d rank - which is still not achieved - I have limited myself to 2d and 1d. Against 2d I'm probably about 50-50 (edit: that's right, 7-6 in the past months on OGS). Against 1d I would almost claim to have an easy game (edit: 9-2), if I'm careful enough not to make mistakes way below my level of understanding, but against 3 dans the mission seems almost impossible today (0-3). Here I feel like I have to consistently play on my level of understanding and frequently play beyond that. Even when pulling off a tactical victory in a local battle, opponents are very good at controlling the damage. Usually it is me who's on the receiving end of tactical superiority with lesser capability to dodge.

Those few occasions where I outsmart a 3d do give hope. It's a matter of consistently play at that level and also see these opportunities early enough so as to take any alternative plans into account. The level of Go played at 3d is just a higher standard - and that's something to enjoy.

When you've been enjoying a period of success against weaker players, it takes courage to face stronger opponents more regularly. Kudos to you!




This is huge, and I honestly think it's the most important next step in my own development. Weaknesses still abound in my game, but I think I (and most kyu-level players, at least) would gain at least one stone by simply not making mistakes that are way below my level.

Yes. When I go over a game of someone who is, say, 10k, I concentrate much less on "here's where you could have played like a 5k" moments and much more on the "here's where you played like a 15k" moments. For one thing, fixing these mistakes will have a greater effect than other changes (it only takes one blunder to lose a game; playing a great move doesn't guarantee you'll know how to follow it up), and for another, it's usually easier to do than acquiring new skills.

Of course you can't improve forever this way, but I do think there is almost always low-hanging fruit to be had.

This partly came out of my "2021 mistakes" and "2022 mistakes" series, trying to find patterns in big mistakes. Some of these pointed to missing information, like "avoid slow connections" or "surround on a large scale (but check if it is in sente, otherwise consider tenuki)" ... Some other mistakes were plain to see and a result of not thinking or having a momentary lapse of reason. The question is then: WHY am I making these stupid mistakes. And that mostly comes down to what I mistakenly called "gamesmanship" and consists of 1) fighting spirit 2) proper time management 3) checking liberties and overall be disciplined in actually selecting candidates and reading a few move deeps to choose the best one. And an important prerequisite is to play games when I'm fit, as a deliberate act and not just a time killer or a late night closure of the day (which is what I often do).

So, improving at Go needs sacrifice of the best time I have, not the killer time. And that also means I'm voiding myself of an easy excuse for losing: it wasn't serious anyway.

While on KGS I can hold my own against a 4d - perhaps incidental - and hold a stable 2d rank, flirting with 3d, on OGS I'm dropping down, losing badly these days against 1d.

OGS is interesting that way. I think there is more variance in strength for a given rank.

_________________
be immersed

But how are the mistakes in the losses to 1d? (Hint: you could post a game). I think focussing too much on rank can be a distraction from making progress in learning.

When I get back to my home laptop (travelling) I'll make some analyses. You are right and for 1,5 year I have been training and reviewing without caring about rank. Now I wanted to get proof points that I'm improving. I am solving problems I couldn't before and I have had a "feeling" I understand more. But still, there's a yummy pudding in front of me, which is playing and possibly beating higher ranked players. Eating it, that kind of proof is not happening to the extent I hoped, as noted above. Intrinsic motivation only goes midway for me.

From the OGS interface analysis, moves 48 to 54 were all mistakes, committing suicide to my invasion. Not a mistake, but a choice leading to the potential of making these mistakes, was the reinforcement in the lower right, allowing Black to build up his moyo. Invasions are definitely a weak point, which is also disappointing given the amount of tsumego I do.

Thanks for posting the game . I think this is just one to put behind you and not read too much into it.

It feels like you got persuaded against better judgement into one of those horrible risk management situations on the left side (with 42 and following) where the risk is all on your side and the potential loss is huge. Would be interested in other views though.

I don't know what AI says, but to me, 32 was the first move that struck me as odd. Black is so strong on the left side both above and below that giving way with a one point jump to E11 seems much more natural than digging in, and also more consistent with the keima before.

_________________
A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.

AI finds a way to live. So it doesn't scorn this move.

For me it was too tough, like dust said and I had multiple chances to take it easy: hane at 26 not play in the corner, reduce at 28 not invade, one space jump at 30 not keima, sacrifice at 32 not fight ...

In this game my opponent didn't give me a hard time, since he was overplaying all the time and I only needed to be mindful of my own groups to see his fall into my arms as ripe apples.

Still I want to highlight some moves that came intuitive to me but weren't on KataGo's radar at all or the other way around.

50 seems odd / inconsistent with the atari you played. If you played the other atari then at least you are threatening p13 (ladder doesn't work, but with p15 peep maybe something does, though black can always give up 1 stone if it does) or o12. Whereas the atari you played aims at m17 sheanigans, but means you have less good follow ups on outside so n12 is even worse than if you didn't do that atari.

I did a more lengthy analysis with KG on move 48-50

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$ Position at move 47
$$ ---------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . X O . . |
$$ | . . a . X O . . O . X . . . . X O . . |
$$ | . . . X . O . . . , . . . . . X O . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . O X X c . . . X O . |
$$ | . . . X . . . . . O O O X . . . X O . |
$$ | . X . . . . . . . . . . O X . . X O . |
$$ | . . O . . . . . . . . . d . . . X . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . X . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . O . . . . . . . . . . . . . O . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . O , X X . . . b . . . . . O . . . |
$$ | . . . O O X . . . X . . . X O . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . X X O . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ ---------------------------------------[/go]

With 39K and 26K playouts respectively, KG is ambivalent about A (+5,9) and B (+5,8).
With considerably less playouts (1,5K) the atari at C (+5,6) is only slightly worse while stretching at D (+4,6) is probably already a minor mistake.

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$W Atari
$$ ---------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . X O . . |
$$ | . . a . X O . . O . X e . . . X O . . |
$$ | . . . X . O . . . , . . . . . X O . . |
$$ | . d . . . . . . . O X X 1 . . . X O . |
$$ | . . . X . . . . . O O O X 2 . . X O . |
$$ | . X . . . . . . . . . . O X . . X O . |
$$ | . . O . . . . . . . . . . . . . X . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . X . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . O . . . . . . . . . . . c . O . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . O , X X . . . b . . . . . O . . . |
$$ | . . . O O X . . . X . . . X O . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . X X O . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ ---------------------------------------[/go]

After the atari, C is the blue move (16K, +5,0) so the higher number of playouts reduces the value by 0,6. A, B, D and E are candidates to improve on C.

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$W Atari & Stretch
$$ ---------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . 4 . . . . . . . . . X O . . |
$$ | . . a . X O . . O . X e . . . X O . . |
$$ | . . . X . O . . . , . . . . . X O . . |
$$ | . d . . . . . . . O X X 1 . . . X O . |
$$ | . . . X . . . . . O O O X 2 . . X O . |
$$ | . X . . . . . . . . . . O X . . X O . |
$$ | . . O . . . . . . . . . 3 . . . X . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . X . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . O . . . . . . . . . . . c . O . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . O , X X . . . b . . . . . O . . . |
$$ | . . . O O X . . . X . . . X O . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . X X O . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ ---------------------------------------[/go]

When White stretches, KG drops White's lead to 2,3 provided Black secures the corner with (16K)

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$W Stretch first
$$ ---------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . 1 . . . . . . . . . X O . . |
$$ | . . a . X O . . O . X e . . . X O . . |
$$ | . . . X . O . . . , . . . . . X O . . |
$$ | . d . . . . . . . O X X . . . . X O . |
$$ | . . . X . . . . . O O O X . . . X O . |
$$ | . X . . . . . . . . . . O X . . X O . |
$$ | . . O . . . . . . . . . 1 . . . X . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . X . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . O . . . . . . . . . . . c . O . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . O , X X . . . b . . . . . O . . . |
$$ | . . . O O X . . . X . . . X O . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . X X O . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ ---------------------------------------[/go]

When White stretches, the lead drops to 4 pts with 30K playouts.

So overall, making central shape in gote loses 1,9 points. Making the bad atari before loses an additional 1,7 points.
The bad atari is probably a more stable value while losing gote depends largely on the available sente.

The most important goal for White is to play at A.

B is only recommended because White retains the privilege to play at A after playing B first.

A is an important move for White because it weakens the top left black group and helps to exploit this weakness for Whites advantage.

Strike while the iron is hot.

Thanks, I find this style of commentary helpful. It's especially interesting to see the occasions where KataGo wants to leave the shape "unfinished".

It will take a lot to keep it but today I bumped up my KGS rank and OGS rank to 3d and 2d. Might be inflation again but I might have grown a little again too. Anyway it's motivating to see consistent playing and reviewing pay off.

I recently saw this video by Veritasium on expertise. It claims, supported by scientific studies cited, that there are 4 prerequisites to achieve (high levels of) expertise. Two of them are about the domain and two about yourself

The domain needs
1. to be valid, i.e. expertise in it should be verifiable and repeatable and not just attributed to luck. The trivial example is roulette, the less trivial one is the stockmarket
2. to allow for fast feedback, i.e. you should see the immediate impact of your actions so as to gauge if any modification to previous action is potentially successful

You need to
3. put in the hours
4. but also push yourself in trying out new things, gradually attempting a higher level

Go is obviously skill based so for those putting in the hours and pushing their limits, expertise should be looming ahead. The 2nd condition is the interesting one. Although the end result of a single game is a clear outcome of either success or failure, it is not so easy to attribute any move to that win or loss, let alone learning from the experience in the next game, because games are very different, especially when losing moves are played.

This is why tsumego, replaying pro games (trying to predict every move, as per John's recent advice) but also review of your own games with AI. Tsumego are isolated situations, removing most of the variety of the whole board situation, leading to insight about vital points or living/killing techniques. Predicting a pro game has instant feedback every move of the game. Reviewing your game with AI too, although the lessons can only be drawn in bulk after the game.

Move prediction through transcribing certainly does give feedback on every move, and this type of learning has a deeper value, too - one usually overlooked in other fields. Namely, for each move you are getting data about the exact frequency in which each type of move occurs, and by extension data on the exact frequency of contexts in which each move occurs (and all of this is being done in a way that suits the way your brain's neurons collect data).

As an example of this, one thing I noticed years ago (and wrote an article about it somewhere) was that the type of move most likely to trigger a resignation was a monkey jump. I confirmed this by writing a program to show on which line resignation-inducing moves occurred and finding examples with Kombilo. But because I was intrigued and sensitised, I started noticing (from transcribing) that monkey jumps were often ignored. So I became aware of context. Although I had some fairly reliable data to show that at least considering ignoring a monkey jump was fine, in in terms of what we might call "go knowledge" I didn't really understand this, and so would never ignore the damn simian. But I did find the explanation eventually, in O Meien's celebrated endgame book. So my intuition ("can ignore") was right, and I was wrong to doubt it.

But there was an interesting additional take-away from that episode, for me. Being a words guy, I started wondering whether having a name for each kind of move was a way of optimising how to learn by this process. In other words, if a type of move didn't have a name, would I notice/learn it no matter how frequently it occurred? My gut reaction is to say yes, but with the reservation that I might not learn it as thoroughly as when it did have a name. But I still have niggling doubts. It may simply be that when a move type has a name, you can see it talked about in books or you talk about it with other people, and all this talk has the effect of strengthening the associations already existing within the brain. But it has nothing to do directly with the actual frequencies noticed (subliminally) when transcribing. This certainly feels true of the monkey jump.

This seems to be potentially important in the case of studying with AI. If you want to play like an AI, the correct procedure seems not to review your own games with it, or to study pro games with it, but to transcribe moves from a single diagram of games in which AI plays AI. But AI plays moves we find strange, and because they are strange, we don't have a name for them. It seems our instinct is then to give names to them, and the prime example has to be Direct 3-3. But other moves have defied naming so far. Does that matter? Again, my gut reaction is to say yes, but with reservations.

One reservation became clear to me when looking at the book chess book "Game Changer" that dfan mentioned somewhere. He suggested, I think, that this proved that AI can already offer specific ways to improve in chess, and by extension go. My impression, after just an early reading of the book, is that the authors (Sadler and Regan, the latter being a British go player BTW) don't claim that in the manner that we want to take it. In other words, it won't work that way for oldies like most people on this site. It will work, however, but only eventually, for youngsters who come into the game with clean slates of a brain and who learn by putting in the hours replaying AI games instead of the human pro games we grew up with.

I further get the impression that Sadler and Regan believe that this process for the newcomers can be enhanced by identifying now (i.e. naming) the most distinctive and important chess concepts that they think they can detect in AI play (and do note they take as their basis AI versus AI games, not AI versus humans). As with the French Revolution, it is too early to say they are right. But I find their approach interesting, with interesting implications for go.

What S & R do, as dfan mentioned, is to identify core concepts (rather than move types) such as opposite-side castling, or outposts connected with piece mobility, or advancing rook pawns.

This made me aware first, that chess and go differ markedly in how they use names. Move types are not named very often in chess, whereas just about every move type can be named in go (this may contribute to the over-obsession with shape that many go players have). Even when a move type does seem to have a parallel in both games, the associations are quite different. A knight's move in chess is mainly just to do with explaining the rules, but in go it has to do with attacking, waist-cuts, or even (for some of us) to do with disagreements between Shusai and Kitani. Moves types in general have very rich associations in go. In chess the associations seem to derive more from wider concepts.

But I am wondering now, in the AI age, if we should be following chess. For example, we still talk of shoulder hits even though the AI use of them tends to baffle us (and pros). Maybe we should be inventing concept phrases such as (for the old shoulder hit) "creating an early outpost in the centre". In a way, this is what Direct 3-3 does: it stresses the time element rather than the shape element. I would also argue, incidentally, that the ancient Chinese got there first with their "call & response" concept (zhao ying), and I would further posit that amashi is a Japanese equivalent (i.e. an example of a concept rather than a shape, though in this case with the caveat that Go Seigen thought the Chinese genius Huang Longshi was the first master of amashi).

This urge to name does seem universal. I mentioned elsewhere that shogi players learnt to favour early pushes of the side pawns (the rook pawns in chess), something that horrified generations of chess masters but has now become common. The S & R book told me that a British chess master (Simon somebody) has given the pushed king's rook pawn the name Harry (from being on the h file). I think this is a great example of our naming urge, an urge we probably should extend to go, but with an emphasis, like chess, on concepts rather than shapes.

Going back to my intro, what I meant by repetition having a deeper value that is often overlooked in other fields can be illustrated from my own experience in languages. I remember from early schooldays having to learn the names of flowers in French. One that stuck in my mind was glycine = wisteria. I had no idea what a wisteria was (no internet in those days, no bookshop in my home town), and I never found out until I saw Japanese hanafuda playing cards. Since I later discovered that it was named in honour of Caspar Wistar, and so should really be wistaria, it has a firm, but useless, space in my memory.

But when I was reaching Japanese at university, my students were all naval architects (who only wanted to read Japanese, not speak it). The approach I took, therefore, was to handle the grammar with special look-up tables and for the vocabulary they simply translated technical articles in their own specialised fields. This meant that they only ever encountered vocabulary that they wanted in, each term in the exact frequency it occurred in real life. This approach (using translation as an equivalent of transcribing in go) was so efficient that the course took only 49 hours. At the end they could read technical texts quickly and accurately, though with the back-up of a dictionary (Katago?) and the grammar tables.

Would that we could get good results so quickly in go - but maybe we do, already? Is that - playing over pro games - why the likes of Sumire and Fujita Reo got so good so young? After all, when they were five so they could hardly read books or understand pro talk. I remember being with five-year-old Liao Xingwen. He couldn't read much text but he was a whizz with go diagrams, and kept books full of them under his pillow.

(Hopefully Knotwilg won't mind that this discussion is continuing here.) Naming things is incredibly powerful. It's both helpful for memory and also provides a shortcut and automatic generalization in discussion (if I say "shortage of liberties" in discussing a position, a player will both immediately know what I'm talking about and also instantly "page in" their knowledge of how shortage-of-liberties techniques tend to work).

A striking example from another field: all music historians know how mid-18th-century classical music works, of course, and know what sounds idiomatic and what doesn't, but many of the patterns that occur in it were not thoroughly identified and named until quite recently when Robert Gjerdinden published Music in the Galant Style in 2007; he made a big list of typical patterns, often giving them names for the first time, and demonstrated that he could name and classify pretty much any phrase in a 1750-era piece of music. Now "schemata theory" is the standard way to look at music of that period.

In chess, one recent book I enjoyed was Bronznik's Techniques of Positional Play, which takes 45 concepts that strong players know but haven't generally codified, giving them names and providing examples.

One danger with naming concepts is that it is the first step on the dangerous road to thinking about games in English (or Japanese or whatever) rather than go-ese or chess-ese. This is the main topic of Willy Hendriks' interesting chess book Move First, Think Later, which I know John has read because he's written at length about it.

The naming of move types is indeed much more rare in chess than go. There's castling, of course, which is unique enough both in form and function to be treated specially. The closest thing I can think of to "hane"-type names is fianchettoing a bishop. Other names tend to be more about tactics (fork, skewer, etc.).