Ever since I learned to play go I've always had at least one strategic concept I knew I didn't even apply; usually, more than one.

Is there a point where you already know everything about go and just have to learn to do the same but better? Or are there subtler and subtler concepts to learn and apply, all the way to the top.

All the "concepts" are just heuristics that abstract something that may or may not be meaningful about any particular game. I guarantee that no matter how many times you decide you have "learned it all", the very next day some obnoxious SOB that hasn't studied anything but the bottom of a beer glass in years is going to clean your clock! There is no end to the complexity of Go; there is only overconfidence.

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

Until go is solved ( ) there will always be new strategic concepts to learn.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

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No, they are better than that! They come with principles and methods for advice of decision making.

Bill, how long do we still need to solve it, eh?:)

Practically speaking, a few weeks ago, I have rediscovered a very important strategic concept I have never seen mentioned in literature, never heard of and completely overlooked in my games, but I am sure that must exist verbally among professionals and inseis. Don't worry, it is such a nice concept that I will write at least one book about it (for that reason, I do not reveal it now). The type of thing you'd wish would have reached the Western knowledge pool decades earlier.

Well yes, that is what heuristics are, right?

_________________
Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

You can never run out of strategic concepts, because you can always come up with more and more complicated, less and less applicable heuristics, and you can always give names to more and more tenuous abstractions that arise on the board.

But you definitely run out of useful concepts rather quickly.

Even solving games doesn't automatically give us a human-friendly strategy. Checkers has been solved; does that mean a human can go look up the relevant proof and quickly reach checkers 9d ? What about an easier game like connect 4?

This sounds so negative, but actually current strategic concepts are mostly basic or close to basic. (Connection is basic. Thickness relies on connection etc., so is just a level 2 concept.) Future go theory will see higher levels, but that does not mean "less applicable". It just means that players wishing to become strong need to learn a bit more, e.g., will need level 3 concepts.



No, not as long as people like me are searching for mightier theory or an understanding of existing but still verbal theory.

What one is hitting is something different: the individual researcher will have to slow down his enlisting of concepts after a very short time. The few dozens of known concepts are written down quickly:)

IIRC, the variant played as International Checkers is not solved yet. Right?

True, only 8x8 checkers has been solved, not 10x10. I think my point still holds: you can go to the research website and "play the proof", showing each move as win, lose, or draw down the tree. But I don't think that would help you beat a clever player who doesn't follow a line you memorized.

link: http://chinook.cs.ualberta.ca/users/chinook/index.html

So the proof is only "weak" (without explanation of strategy).

That seems like a pretty strong proof to me... Strategy is not meaningful when talking about solving checkers.

Oh, ye of little faith!

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Consider the following demanding definition of usefulness: A truly useful theoretic concept is one that, if learned by a strong professional, would further improve his play.

If a concept helps weak players but has no effect on professionals, it means that, while useful to these weak players, the concept is replaceable by other kinds of go knowledge or skill, which professionals already have from other sources. In a sense, such a concept is redundant. Such concepts may help weaker players get stronger faster than with traditional instruction, but they don't go past what can be achieved with traditional instruction.

Under this definition, I suspect very strongly that none your theory is useful. What's more, it may actually be harmful. To quote Kageyama:


I suspect that your ideas such as the formula to estimate the influence in joseki are exactly this kind of white elephant, and may actually be harmful in the long run.

I will be delighted if I'm proven wrong by seeing a wave of Jasiek-school professionals demolish the current greats.

There's a technical distinction in game theory between "weak" and "strong" solutions of a game.

Yes, but it has nothing to do with being able to explain the strategy behind perfect play.

super weak: we know there is a perfect play
medium: We know perfect play
Super strong: an algorithm can from any position, with mistakes already made play the rest of the game perfectly.

nothing about strategy

I can't actually remember Otake Hideo's opening principles any more, and many other useful things. Fuseki for me is now about:

1. Specific knowledge, I know in this sort of fuseki these are sorts of joseki options.

2. Joey's spin on the direction rule: approach corners, try to get the 3-3 point, try to get the wider side.

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Revisiting Go - Study Journal
My Programming Blog - About the evolution of my go bot.

Such a definition makes the wrong assumption that there would be concepts useful ONLY for strong professionals. Every player has the principle possibility to learn and apply!



Such as the "concept" of imagining alive stones as green and dead stones as red?



This makes several assumptions, of which I do not discuss all now. Just to mention one: You assume that all weaker players could learn well from traditional instruction, a wrong assumption.



Under which "this" definition? Your second one, the "replaceable" one? And you are "suspecting very strongly" that none of my theory would "be useful", i.e., "provide professionals with new insight that they would not already have achieved in other ways"? Is this what you are claiming? If not, then please explain very carefully what you mean, so that I do not need to waste arguing against something you might not mean!



You are suspecting that my theory might be harmful?

1) How can any correct go theory be ever harmful? (Wrong theory can.)

2) The average(!) comment on my books by customers in personal communication is: "very good". This is not a degree one would associate with "harmful" at all.

3) E.g., about three books of the kind of Joseki 1 Fundamentals (i.e. also two similar, still non-existing ones on the middle game) would have saved me ca. 16 months delay from 3 to 4 dan. During that time, almost all of my learning was related to studying simple fundamentals, which were not in English books but which I had to extract by overinterpreting a tiny percentage of (for me) interesting moves in diagrams of - during that period - ca. 200 of Asian teaching only by examples books. I.e., the theory in books like Joseki 1 Fundamentals is the opposite of harmful: it can be extremely helpful. I do not call all those example books harmful - I call them extremely inefficient (but at that time more efficient books were not available for the kind of knowledge I needed).

4) Yang Yilun's Fundamental Principles' joseki chapter teaches a small fraction of principles of the kind to be found in Joseki 1 Fundamentals. To maintain your claim, you would need to apply it also to his book.

5) [Detailed explanations why each aspect of my theory in my books is not harmful are omitted at the moment. You want great amounts of free teaching, don't you?;)]



Kageyama is absolutely right that ladders must be read out and that there is (essentially) no shortcut to determining if a ladder works (well, unless there is a solid opposing wall in the right direction; then a visual approximation is a valid shortcut to reading out the ladder explicitly).



You have no understanding what you are talking about when comparing ladders with influence.

1) When Kageyama wrote his book, everybody knew what was a "ladder". The "influence" concept was pretty nebulous, so nebulous that information about influence and thickness reaching Europe made it very hard to understand well the differences between the two concepts. I needed years to work out that by myself. This extra difficulty slowed down my (nevertheless fast) improvement from 10k to 5d.

2) What you are trying to say with your ladder reference appears to be: instead of understanding and applying influence conceptually, one must understand and apply it by reading. Have you even noticed that my influence definition RELIES ON READING? It requires reading to assess the degrees of influence!

3) [For example applications how knowing degrees of influence are useful, see Joseki 2 Strategy. You don't get vast amounts of free teaching just by provoking me and playing the devil's grandma.]



Me too. Let us be patient so that I can research in and write a sufficient amount of knowledge for that purpose. You know, go has more topics than josekis and their related strategy.

@Jasiek, you should organise some kind of informal or semi-formal study of online go players and their modes/sources for learning.

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Revisiting Go - Study Journal
My Programming Blog - About the evolution of my go bot.