Great, I'll start looking for you all when I log on to KGS. Depending on how our schedules match up it may not be necessary to plan ahead for matches.

An interesting handicap system is, 2 or 3 straight wins means a shift of one stone in handicap between those two players.

Maybe we could keep a chart of handicaps somewhere, and go with this... you get 2 or 3 games ahead of your opponent, the handicap changes. I'd assume that no handicap would be alternating colours, no komi? That would favour the handicap remaining equal if the players are, since a game is in one players favour each time. We could also do more nuanced handicaps, like BWB or B2B in this way.

To keep track of handicaps, perhaps something like a google docs spreadsheet would work for a limited number of people. I don't think anyone expects this to get huge?

Changing the handicap with three straight wins was the custom when I learned to play. The change was one stone except when going from playing Black to alternating between Black and White or using nigiri. (Komi? Bah! ) Something that is fun is changing the handicap after every game. You win with White, you give two stones next time. You lose with White, you take Black.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Incidentally, do people care about standard time controls?

I just reached 3k!

This is the highest I've ever been, and after so long (years?) mooching around as a 4k/5k it really feels great. I think the biggest contributing factor has been the answerless tsumego. Once my reading improved my opponents just started dying all the time; even when I'm not going for the kill they seem to insist on it.

Great! Congrats, mate. Now, I have to regain my lead

Looks like that won't be long; your rating graph is impressively steep.

Thx. Well, it has to bend to the right sometime. I just hope it will be as late as possible

I've decided to decrease the amount of studying I'm doing because I haven't been keeping up with it for the last few weeks. It's frustrating to have to do this because of how much I was enjoying it before, but I think it's better to acknowledge that my enthusiasm has dulled, and make a new plan that I can enjoy sticking to. In the long run I'll probably improve more this way, and I'll definitely have more fun doing it.

The plan is just:

Tsumego - 10 mins
(Study one of) Own game/Pro game/Theory book - 10 mins

I just finished the first session and I think the balance is about right; it was fun and not at all a struggle to get through, and though I wouldn't have minded doing some more, I had no strong urge to continue either.

Shygost's Lectures

Rather than waste time reading this post just go and watch some: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSCvH6BH ... 15A59266C2

Recently I've been watching a lot of Shygost's youtube lectures, and I have to say I'm really impressed by his ability to explain things. He's the only (youtube) teacher I've seen who's able to take a question and come up with examples that demonstate his answer and then alter things to demonstrate how that affects his judgement and what the key points are. I've gotten used to people explaining their choice in a specific case, and I often thought I understood it, but seeing shygost alter things and give other examples really accentuates the key points and makes things a lot clearer. He does it the other way round too. If he gives a general statement he usually won't just tack on the normal disclaimer that "it depends on the specifics of the situation", he'll give examples that demonstrate what those specifics are. The man has a real flare for teaching so I'd recommend everyone check out his lectures.

I started watching them because of dusk eagle's post:


And I'm actually experiencing the same thing. Strength and weakness is is just so much more obvious (and important) now.

Concentration Quest

My study activities have always been too focused on the specific subject of interest with not enough attention given to the underlying study skills. I'm seriously lacking in a lot of these so this is the first of a series of posts that will chronicle my attempts to improve these core skills and the effect it has on my go study. Hopefully I'll see some immediate improvement as it forces me to study more efficiently, but I expect the real benefits to be long term.


Concentration Quest Part 1: It's time to time my study time.

Unsurprisingly given the title, the first item on my agenda is improving my ability to concentrate since that is something of incredible importance that I really struggle with. The method by which I'm going to go about training it comes from an observation I recently shared on Skydyr's journal: the best musicians at the conservatoire where I study also seem to be the ones that take the most brakes (a lot more than you might expect). This has been the source of much consideration on my part. It's easy to draw the conclusion that they need to take more breaks because they achieve a deeper level of concentration which cannot be maintained as long, but I wonder if that's only half the picture. Perhaps these people are so good at focusing precisely because they take these breaks. I'm sure it's still only part of the story, but if they've learned to manage their focus levels by taking breaks when needed, perhaps they've also been inadvertently honing their ability to concentrate whenever they practice.


The Goals

1) Gain the ability to decide when I'm going to concentrate.
2) Become able to achieve deeper levels of concentration.
3) Increase the duration of time I'm capable of concentrating.

The method:]

Obviously I'm making this up as I go along so I'm still pretty hazy on the details, but I've been doing this for a week now and I've come up with a basic method and a few rules to help guide me.

Method

Simply set a timer for a short period of time and then engage in your chosen activity without taking a break until the timer goes off. Once it does go off take a short break then get back in to it. Right now my sessions are ranging from 1-10 minutes with breaks usually consisting of nothing more than getting up and walking to the other side of the room, doing a few stretches and then walking back.

Rules:

1) Concentration is always the main goal of any activity - This is important because it makes lapses in concentration much more obvious and has the side effect of improving the quality of a practice session by making it much harder to fool yourself in to thinking you're working hard.
2) Sessions must be short enough that you can genuinely concentrate throughout. - Obviously occasional lapses are going to happen but you should be getting straight back in to it.
3) Vary the length of each session - You don't want to train your brain to stop thinking after a certain amount of time.
3.1) Do sprint sessions and endurance sessions - I'll admit that I've no idea if there's any benefit to this but I at least find it motivating to vary things with short sessions focused on achieving a better quality of concentration and longer sessions aimed at building the endurance to concentrate for extended periods of time.
4) Breaks can be as short or as long as necessary - As I said before, most of my breaks are very short but if I feel it's necessary I'll take longer. I believe it's very important that time spent practicing concentration is actually spent concentrating or you'll just be reinforcing bad habits. Quality not quantity. (Though ideally both.)

Thoughts so far

I've been doing this for about a week and I have to say it's been great. I've already seen noticeable improvements in my general concentration and even if that trend doesn't continue in the long term I still think I'll be doing a lot of my studying this way because the time I now spend taking breaks is already shorter than the time I used to spend daydreaming or failing to properly engage with a task. Using very short intervals has also allowed me to make use of time during which I would previously have considered my self too tired or distracted to engage in anything meaningful.

Concentration Quest Part 2: Real life N-Backing

Thanks to a passing comment from Daal I am now an N-Backer. For those that don't know, n-back is the name of a game (or test depending on your POV) in which you are shown a list of stimuli one at a time and asked signal when it repeats something that happened a specific number of items ago i.e. n-back. There are lots of variants but the one I'm currently doing is called dual n-back, where it it shows two stimuli at the same time. This was used in a study of fluid intelligence a while ago and is purported to be able to increase a persons working memory. A lofty claim given that this was previously considered impossible and I'm not sure if the claims are true or not, but I find the game addictive so I'll stick with it for a while at least.

The reason I'm making this post is that I've been thinking a lot about what is involved in an n-back task and realised there is potential to do the same thing with a lot of other activities. The crux of n-back is that you have to retain awareness of a lot of things at one time and keep track of how they change. (That's basically what working memory is so it would be no surprise if it had benefits beyond the task itself.) Other tasks require a good working memory but n-backing is a task that forces you to constantly push at and expand it's limits, and since we normally try to work around weaknesses not push through them it's easy to see why n-backing might encourage improvement in a way that other apparently intensive tasks do not. But is there any reason we shouldn't just decide to use our working memories more?

There are lots of activities that would clearly benefit from a greater application of working memory so why not approach these as further training opportunities? Take action games like devil may cry and god of war. Despite their reputation as button mashers there's a wonderful grace to the way some players hack their way through a group of enemies while carefully avoiding incoming attacks, and this requires they maintain awareness of a large number of constantly changing stimuli. In my mind the main thing that sets these games apart from an N-back task is that it's possible to play them without stretching your working memory and still feel like your engaging with the game, but that's no reason they shouldn't be just as effective when approached as working memory tasks.

Working memory and go

So what's the role of working memory in go? It obviously plays a large role in reading out complicated variations but often we're not reading to the limits of our abilities* so is it irrelevant the rest of the time? I think we should be doing our best to think of the whole board all the time. Not just taking the time to think about each part of it but viewing the whole thing as a single intricate creation and thus maintaining awareness of how each move is affecting the overall position. It's obviously impossible to be completely aware of everything that's going on, but I do find it's possible to build a semantic model with which I feel areas of influence, strength and weakness etc, and even at my level this can be very helpful. Hopefully as I improve I'll get better at maintaining this awareness and be able to build more detailed mental pictures.

*At least I'm not. Let me know if you think I should be.

P.s. The musically inclined N-backer should look in to the Kodaly technique. By using your voice along with hand signs that represent pitches it's possible to perform solo canons and doing this without rehearsal is basically a working memory task. If you're awesome you can make it even more difficult by adding in rhythmic accompaniments, or even sign pitches with both hands, and it strikes me as a great way of developing musical skills while training your working memory.

I seem to have jumped to 1k

Yes, I think you can

Greetz, Tom

_________________
“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

I'm not sure what it is you're saying I can do but I appreciate the encouragement.

Well, I thought … since the question in the title doesn’t seem to have been answered …

Cordially, Tom

_________________
“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

Thanks for reminding me! "Can I edit the title later" just became a noun to me and I completely forgot I was going to change it.

P.s. Yes I am comparing my struggle to reach 1 dan with one of humanity's greatest achievements.

I'm returning to go after a who knows how long hiatus (kgs deletion long) and it's great fun but also inevitably quite frustrating. I decided a good way to ease the pain of shaking the rust from my brain would be to do a somewhat lazy review of a game I won. I do of course appreciate feedback comments but bare in mind that part of the point of this review is to just wallow in the spoils of my glorious victory, so don't be putting too much effort in to them.



Edit: I just read back this sentence!

I decided a good way to ease the pain
of shaking the rust from my brain
would be to do a somewhat lazy review of a game

When I haven't played in a month or so, I'll go on a wild losing streak and occasionally be relegated down to 1k, at which point I can automatch with 2ks and have a very parallel experience.

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