My understanding is that as a young man he felt he could solve physical problems conceptually (special relativity), but reached an impasse he ended up needing help with (the complex mathematics of general relativity), and become a much more studious mathematician afterwards in his work towards a Unified Theory, having seen that these levels of problems did seem to require a deeper mathematical approach. He was certainly a competent mathematician at a minimum.

I wasn't suggesting otherwise. What I've heard about him was that he could have easily become a professional mathematician, he just was more drawn to theoretical physics. It wasn't lack of ability but simple lack of expertise and the fastest way to remedy this kind of thing if you've got a good aptitude for mathematics is to bring in a mathematician familiar with the area to work with on certain sections.

I think you people are mixing three different things in here:

1. It is obvious that if you aim at the very top the starting age does matter. All things being equal (dedication, effort, talent, teacher, etc) the extra 10 or so years of head start can have a tremendous influence. Thus - very few, if any, of the toppest pros started learning late.

2. For somebody wanting to just reach a low-level pro, I think it is possible to start late, but you have to work really hard. Not sure if there are examples of that out there, but I would not be surprised if there were. What age did Catalin start, for example? Or Alex? And can all his years playing in Europe as an ama be called 'starting'?

3. In our case of bumbling-along amateurs trying to get an extra rank on KGS - age is much less important, and starting age even less so. Why? Because the other factors (dedication, effort, talent, teacher, etc) are a much more limiting factor to our development.

As I said before - age limits two things:
- speed of learning and
- maximum potential

Since we never reach our maximum potential by far, the fact that it is lower does not matter all that much. The lower speed of learning means that you have to work that much harder. When you reach a level where you have to work that hard just to stay there, you start to deteriorate with age unless you put more and more effort. And even then it will catch up with you in time.

Just my 2c.

PS>
And what is this talk about Einstein? He was a Go pro too?!?

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In the context of the discussion, this is rather irrelevant. The issue is not age at which things were achieved, but starting age. In go, there are similar examples. E.g. both Cho Hun Hyun and Cho Chikun won the Samsung Cup in their late forties. Fujisawa Hideyuki even won the Oza several times in his late sixties. But all of these players started young.

16.
6.

You're surely not ascribing hailthorn's being stuck at 6k to early-twenties dementia? Getting stuck at 4-5d, or if he was in his seventies, yes, maybe. But what I said was simply that I was limited by many other factors far more than my age. My age isn't what's holding me back from getting stronger right now - what's holding me back is that I play a casual game maybe once a fortnight, and instead sit here drinking green tea and posting on L19, working, in the pub, or spending my time on some other hobby or oversleeping.


Of course there are no examples of people who start in their 20s and make it. There are no examples of people who start in their 20s and then put in the requisite tens of thousands of hours with regular professional tuition studying like their future depended on it. 0 out of 0 is not an interesting statistic. That's my point: you can't statistically isolate the age factor. It's dwarfed by several other factors, like lack of time and interest and dedication.

Start at what? Pro training? Or playing along with Go stones?

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Playing.

Well, that means nothing much then, unless there is more. Playing and seriously training towards prohood might be two different things. I started at 14 or so (so before Catalin) and look at us now... I think its the time you start seriously training, like with teacher and stuff, that should matter here.

I think for most top pros we are not really interested in when they learned the rules of Go but when they started receiving proper training.

Same goes for violinists, if this is even related. The fact that you pick up a violin and start making noise at 6, but do not get a teacher until you are 27 - does not mean the same as training properly with a good teacher many hours a day since you were 6.

So... do you know when Catalin and Alex actually started proper training, whatever this means?

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This is a bad week to be chucking around tired cliches like this, since Zhang Yitang just made waves for making progress on the twin primes conjecture. He must be at least 50, right?

I chose Lorentz because of his connection to Einstein's work, but a quick search pulls up Alexandre Vandermonde as a mathematician who did important work and apparently started studying math at 35.




I learned Chess in those hazy years before you can reliably pick out memories, probably 4. I played a reasonable amount and cared about improving to defeat my mother. I learned Go at the age of 25. A year and a half later I'm a better Go player than I am a chess player.

I met a very young mid-dan player once. But his father was a high dan amateur Korean player. How many of us taught the game by an expert and play exclusively with experts from our start?



That's my point as well. We have no theory of the brain sufficient to say "yes, you need to start as a young child to really excel". We've got no way to control people's lives enough to test this idea. We've got no good statistical way of approaching the question, because the confounding factors are huge. An 8 year old dedicating 10 years to becoming a go professional would fail in time to go to college with his peers. A 20 year old would be 30 with no degree, career experience or savings. The opportunity costs are so drastically different as to be sufficient to explain the difference on their own.

It could very well be true. My skepticism arises though, because 1) this is the sort of idea people love to believe (should I put long, hard hours into mastering the piano? Oh, I'm too old to be the best anyways, I'll just have fun.) 2) this is the sort of idea people love to tell each other (You're too old to be the a great piano player instead of 'you're just not that good at it') 3) This is the sort of idea that reinforces itself. If people believe only children can be great at Go, the great teachers aren't going to want to help the 15 year olds starting out. If you're told you can't do something enough, it becomes very hard to actually accomplish it.

http://senseis.xmp.net/?CatalinTaranu -- there are a couple of players who started in their late teens and made mid-range professional. I know of no 9 dan who started that late.

I think Catalin was rather obsessive soon after he started, and he made quick progress.

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There's also Kim Sung Rae who, unusually for a native Korean, became pro in his 30s, though he had played as an amateur on-and-off since childhood.

Liang Wei Tang 9d once told me that being a competitive professional is better for a young person not because of "go strength", but the stamina to play many matches in one day (or days) for tournaments. He cited that as the main reason for older pros to bow out and start teaching unless they were at the very top.

Of the world title winners, Seo Bongsoo probably started the latest (~age 13). Lee Changho/Lee Sedol/Cho Hunhyun were already pros by the age that Seo started learning go. He had other problems, too: No money, no teacher, no books. It is said that he first got his hands on a copy Xuanxuan Qijing only after turning pro and remarked "What a wonderful book!" He didn't even have access to the classics. Then again, I get the feeling that he was a genius...although the prevailing narrative is that he was not.

I don't know of "normal" people who learned go later than that and won titles.

What about Sakai Hideyuki? He was a doctor (completed medical school and all) before turning pro although he was Fujisawa Shuko's student long before that. He may have started early for all I know, but he must have taken a huge break from go while he was in med school and while he was working.

There is evidence on age affecting learning abilities. Please have a look stuff call myelin which is needed in learning skills. Age affects in two ways:
- amount of myelin creation is age dependent. At the age 50 one strat loseit about same rate as one gains it. So you need train stuff just not to lose skills.
- learning only myelinizes new tracks. It does not remove old erroneous ones ==> re-learning something is hard as you don really forget the old stuff, but you just have to learn new one better than the old. Older you get more stuff you have in your head already. Also if one plays around for a year before serious study that can also harm learning.

Also ar soft limits as discussed above. 23 year old is far less likely to find time/motivation needed to go around 1p strengt. I do doubt that EGF 6 dan is really within reach. It just might but I don't think so

Nature never heard about equality of all men

If anything, the fact that a player who started young can spend the huge amounts of time necessary to get a medical degree and still become pro after that would support the notion that starting young is very important.

Sakai was professional strength before he finished medical training. He won several amateur national championships in Japan and was considered the strongest amateur in Japan for a period. In 2000 he won the world amateur championship . He became an official pro by defeating pros in even test games, winning two against a pro 5-D and one against a pro 7-D, and entered the pro ranks as a pro 5-D.

Yes, I know. What I am addressing is the argument that kids just have loads of time, and that that is the real reason they get as far as they do. IMO, you don't get a medical degree without spending quite some time on it. Not just in college, but also in school. There is no way Sakai Hideyuki just spent all his time on go.

When I did my PhD, Alex Abercrombie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Abercrombie) was a couple of years' ahead of me. He taught himself maths, and applied to do an undergraduate degree. He had taught hmiself so much maths that he was directly accepted onto a PhD bypassing undergraduate courses. He did pioneering research in his PhD, and I believe he published 17 articles in 3 years.

He got his doctorate in 1996 at the age of 47, taking 3 years. Prior to studying maths, he was a concert pianist. He is now a concert pianist again.