won my last two games in the casual league against Javier A-Savolainen and Amir Fragman by resign after 40 point margins again. Came 2nd on 6/7. Valerii got 7/7!
Well, I have been lucky enough so far to avoid coronavirus. Also lucky enough to start a new job project recently.
Ever since AI, I felt improving at Go seemed more pointless and I have that feeling again.
My training pre 5d (2013 Nov to 2017 ish):Lots of KGS games every day, several Go clubs weekly. I started with Nick Sibicky, later Dwyrin and then many hours of Chinese pro videos (tywq, weiqitv) every week (or even day), lots of NHK and KBS cup too without understanding the language. bought no books but did skim 1 or 2 I think,
I'm not sure I thought of it as training, but more an addiction. I think I liked to record my games and theorise (nonsense) about what I was doing wrong. If I had a theory question, I read Sensei's library. I think I was relatively good at endgame and reading on the board with patience to calculate more, but weak at instinct and didn't have enough tsumego experience. I think I had some preliminary ideas to CGT without having heard of it, but was particularly curious about things that sound like they make sense but we can't prove like "play on wider direction etc." . Perhaps it was jarring to my experience of mathematical proof.
2017-2019 stalling at 5d:pretty much as above + AI reviews + watch lots of AI games, but less and less of everything. KGS, Pandanet games tending to zero, leaving only games at (very few) tournaments.
Helped organise ICGT 2018, though looking back, I'm not sure I managed to contribute much. It was completely outside my normal experience and hence pretty interesting though. Passed (but terribly) in my degree. Some new (Taiwanese?) channels appeared on youtube in Chinese (e.g. GoGo) that I followed. Tried to program a small neural net to play tictactoe and failed. Tried to analyse neurons in leelazero and got too many bugs. Got an IT job.
confidence boosting to reach this Go level. But unsure why the stall occurred when I was training like I used to. (perhaps because I was ??)
2019 Dec - Now:Nothing much in terms of training other than very heavy AI reviews after each game (like the whole next day), but somehow reached 6(-7d?) in strength though not officially. And keeping a scarily high winrate on PETC. Dangerously ego boosting. I have noticed the potential pun on the name of this thread.
Stopped following youtube channels almost completely now.
I still feel a bit weak at tsumego, but have included it in my routine more recently. My endgame has gone down the drain compared to my new skills in large scale fighting, especially in punishing my opponent's mistakes. But it remains hard to verbalise any of this instinct. I wrote a couple of "papers", available on LGC, but I feel they are pretty poor quality compared to what I could do, lacking in research, and containing flaws in thinking.
--
I wasn't so sure of my direction. I dreamed of pro a little at one point, but I think it doesn't make sense now. But I think I would like to do some writing about Go. I'm not sure mentioning my goals here is so helpful, but it worked well enough last time (2017 British Champion

).
TBH, I wrote around 40 pages of explaining maths theory of Go (+some new research) + 60 pages of mess around 1.5 years ago. But I haven't really got round to organising it into presentable form, nor clarifying the mess, nor verbalising new ideas. I have no excuse for not making full use of quiet time over the past year. Still, I find as I read more papers that my latest thoughts are often on the right lines towards the results in those papers. Perhaps I can still make progress. Hopefully my maths ability hasn't completely gone down the drain or else I will be an embarrassment to my username.
So my goals in Go for the next year(s) in priority order:
1. Presentable book style of what I have written so far + extensions. Not sure about publishing. I'm not sure there will be much audience for such topics anyway, but I still think it's worth organising current knowledge into a coherent course sequence of material. I had never heard of most of it before I started investigating.
2. Do more research into existing mathematical research in Go. I have used only free resources so far, so I may consider buying some classics, such as Mathematical Go.
3. Do some Go research of my own if I can.
4. British Champion once more