Magicwand continues off-topic discussion. His message is repeated here:

lol - what more is there to say?

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Patience, grasshopper.

"one book" is falsehood. "two books" is truth. If you do not distinguish between falsehood and truth, that is your choice. I do distinguish between them.



oren's statement "RJ asserted facts from a book about Cosmic Go that he could not understand." is an arbitrary guess about what my understanding is. The understanding I got from reading the diagrams of the two books by Takemiya about (also) his cosmic go. oren cannot know what my related understanding is because he does not have reading access to my mind. oren can only guess what my understanding is. Contrarily, I know what my related understanding is because I - surprise, surprise - do have reading access to my own related understanding.

My skill (strength of go playing measured by winning) does NOT directly reflect my go theory knowledge. I wish it did directly reflect it; I would be much stronger. However, skill involves more than only knowledge. Would you not agree on that? APPLICATION OF knowledge can require also reading, thinking speed etc. My reading skill and my thinking speed skill do not equal my amount and quality of go theory knowledge.



Everything you post on L19 is advertisment for my books being worthless. It is not a discussion.;)

Apparently you don't read his malkovitch posts - too bad!

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Patience, grasshopper.

Perhaps to take this discussion into a more constructive area (or not, we'll see) ...

I am surprised at how staunch Robert is in his disdain for the term "intuition" and the application of such an idea to the playing of go, even going so far as to equate it (however tentatively) with laziness and an unwillingness to read (forgive me if I'm misrepresenting your position, Robert, but this is what I've gotten from a few of your posts).

There is some truth in your claim of "laziness masked as 'intuition'", at least in my case. I play this game for fun and to relax my mind while still exercising it gently, like taking a nice long walk along a wooded path in the early autumn, when the temperature and the wind are pleasant but neither hot nor cold. I'd get more exercise and become stronger and faster if I decided to jog the path instead of walking, but I'm enjoying the scenery and the experience of just being in this place at this time. Similarly, with go I'm enjoying the experience of the game in front of me, letting my mind wander around the board and playing with the shapes I find.

If the entirety of go is that wooded area I'm walking in, the wooded area is a vast place indeed. I could examine the trees, listen to the natural sounds around me, categorize everything. Some people enjoy that; some even challenge themselves to be able to find their way in as many areas of the woods as possible using the details of what they know to deduce where they should direct their steps next.

Instead, though, I find the meandering path I walk in the woods to be much more pleasant for me. Some details stick in my mind as I pass them by ... a particular tree might stick out as a landmark that I might come across again in my wanderings, as an example ... but the overall goal is not to understand the woods, it's to enjoy the walk.

If I walk the woods enough, I do become familiar with them, slowly. It may not be as "efficient" as careful study and planning, but that's not the beauty I'm looking for here (Note: I do not deny the beauty of mathematics, as it applies to go or otherwise. I don't play go for the math, though).

I just thought you might appreciate a perspective from one of us "intuitive" players. I don't claim to represent all (or even most) of them, but I know I'm not alone in my quest to enjoy the game in front of me, regardless of strength. This isn't always how I've seen it, but as I've mellowed and changed I've found that this perspective leaves behind the obsession with rank I've had previously, anxiety over lost (and won!) games, guilt over studying, and numerous other stresses that I just can't find the time to care about in my busy life.

Back to my wandering, thanks for reading!

My position is: intuition does not exist. I prefer to talk about "subconscious thinking", because this phrase does not make presuppositions of the kind the word intuition is too often associated with.



I appreciate it as from an often subconsciously thinking player:)

What about our game?!?

Oh btw, you have a very comfortable style of writing, I really like it, so I liked it.

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Amsterdam, soon.

Quotation reference:

viewtopic.php?p=120999#p120999



Much better. It would be (almost) the truth instead of falsehood.

Most people aren't quite as pedantic as you are and would know this is equivalent.

Starting Having a conversation (discussion, debate) with Robert may not ever end seems it does not end.

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Amsterdam, soon.

Let me check, but I was sure I posted my move a few days ago ...

EDIT: GAH! I missed YOUR last move! How did that happen? Going over there now.

I would not make the guess that most people would repeat your extraordinarily great mistake of equating "no knowledge gained from diagrams and text" and "no knowledge gained from text".

Or your mistake of "understanding a book" when you can not follow any of the text. You really have a lot to learn, Robert.

I wrote:

viewtopic.php?p=120875#p120875

"I could, of course, read the diagrams and move number / diagram number related references to diagrams (such as move sequences in the text)."

You write:

"your mistake of 'understanding a book' when you can not follow any of the text."

Explanation:

What you perceive as my mistake is my ability to read the diagrams and learn from them. What you perceive as my understanding of a book (mainly) is my understanding of its diagrams.



Therefore I continue to make what you perceive as my mistake: I continue to learn from diagrams also when I cannot read the text around the diagrams.

Perhaps because english is not my native langage, but when it comes to Robert Jasiek vs the others I never read all the comments but I still like it because the forum become very lively !!

RJ:
While an arbitrary claim may have been made about what you understand, is it possible that claiming that the claim is arbitrary is in itself an arbitrary claim about the "arbitrariness" of the original claim?

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be immersed

I agree with your fundamental position that one cannot claim to understand a book when you cannot follow any of the text.

I posit that one can follow slightly more than nothing by having a glossary of go terms (such as aji, atari, tesuji, influence, thickness) available on a sheet of paper. One would have to be a fairly strong player to do this.

Nevertheless, I think that it is impossible to get too much out of a book without reading the text, especially if the book is by Takemiya, who has a unique view of the game compared to his peers. The text in go books often tend to consist of positional analysis, in the absence of which diagrams are often ambiguous signals.

That said, I believe that the overwhelming majority opinion on BadukTV (pre-subtitles) was that just watching the pros play out variations on a demonstration board was very educational even if one did not understand Korean. That would seem to be consistent with Robert's view that he can learn quite a lot from just diagrams. In fact, one might posit that diagrams in published books are more refined given that the author can spend more time on those and also present more of them then is possible in a broadcast. Furthermore, one does not have to understand the sequence before the broadcasters move on to a different one because books have a convenient "rewind" feature (it's called flipping back).

Like I said before, I disagree with Robert's position here, because I personally learn a lot from the text of go books, even if I don't care enough to argue the point.

However! I wonder if those who are mocking Robert are being consistent with themselves, given the aforementioned majority opinion on BadukTV. Do any of you find it implausible that Robert can learn from looking mostly at diagrams in a Japanese book but at the same time find it eminently reasonable that one can learn quite a bit from watching a BadukTV broadcast in Korean?

To start with the trivial: there are lots of problem books with problem diagram, correct answer diagram, wrong answer diagram and maybe one variation diagram. It is extraordinarily easy to understand almost all of such a book.

There are also lots of books similar to problem books but having a short text for each diagram and every text contains some sequence and reference to one, two or three particular moves and obviously little else. It is still very easy to guess much of the text's contents.

The next difficulty is with similar books and chapters. Each chapter carries an unknown heading and a (very) short(!) introduction paragraph. From the diagrams, it often is very easy to guess the contents of heading and introduction paragraph by noticing the common contents of the diagrams.

About only books with (much) more general text or more than one principle / general advice per chapter can pose a problem for an experienced diagram-only reader. Such good books are infrequent among those Asian books easily available in the West or in easily found Asian bookstores.

(And then there are many easy to understand books I avoid such as game selections without or sparse comments. Nowadays, I prefer databases. The sparse comment diagrams were interesting as a kyu player, but now I learn too little from them.)



No. What one needs is an ability to perceive structure, such as the same topic in all diagrams of a chapter.



This can apply to books relying heavily on text other than trivial diagram comments.



Understanding Takemiya is particularly easy for me (for obvious reasons):)



The texts in go books tend to AVOID proper positional analysis! Maybe there are hints "Black is better" or very selective mentioning of strategic aspects ("Black has a wall there, so..."). However, so far I have hardly even seen a proper positional analysis in books about that topic - consistently using an analysis that would at the very least describe how to assess a particular position's territory, with which means (such as imagined sequences) to determine the territory intersections etc. and then show the whole board position with the territory intersections marked. (Detailed positional analysis of aspects other than territory is even rare.)

If the text in books referred to careful positional analysis, then it should demonstrate that by showing what it claims in analysis diagrams as mentioned above. Rather than doing positional analysis, most books with some positional discussion are highly selective about what they discuss at all. While this can make much sense when a book has particular topics, it does not mean that what is discussed should be called "positional analysis". It could often be called "highly selective study of a few particular aspects of positions". E.g., a study that shows sequences proving the existence of some particular aji. Then typically books proceed with showing possible follow-up sequences starting from the current position, but this is about strategic planning and hardly positional analysis.

Are your books very different from that and do they, e.g., always show for every discussed position diagrams with territory intersections marked and text explaining why indeed those are the territory intersections?



Of course, one can learn a lot from text IF there is such text that can be learnt from and IF there is a sufficient amount and quality of such text and IF the text is in a language one knows.