Continued Off-topic Discussion from "Takemiya's Cosmic Go?"

[clemi]

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 !!

[Kirby]

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?

Of course, I'm just trolling here...

[lemmata]

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 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?

[RobertJasiek]

one cannot claim to understand a book when you cannot follow any of the text.

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.)

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.

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

it is impossible to get too much out of a book without reading the text,

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

especially if the book is by Takemiya, who has a unique view of the game compared to his peers.

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

The text in go books often tend to consist of positional analysis,

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?

I personally learn a lot from the text of go books,

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.