Repeated tsumego practice

[Jujube]

I'm going to write a post on my club website about the approach to doing tsumego. The purpose of the post is to recommend GoGrinder to do lots of tsumego problems quickly. Hopefully DDK players can find some insight about how to improve their reading.

I remember reading a blog or a collection of posts somewhere, possibly on lifein19x19, about the practice in China / Korea / Japan about repetition learning. I can't remember the exact phrase, it wasn't repetition learning, but it was similar. The gist of the post was that life and death problems are split into sets of 100 or so problems. Then, the 100 problems were drilled repeatedly, over a week, until the student could more or less solve the problems on sight. Then another 100 problems were tackled in the second week, and so on.

I wanted to back up the post with some brief research about this kind of technique and was wondering if anyone remembers reading about this, or if anyone wanted to chip-in with thoughts about this kind of pattern-drilling that exists in Go schools or in Go curricula.

Thanks!

[Kirby]

do you mean spaced repetition?

[Bill Spight]

This is a topic that has been discussed many times, both here and elsewhere. Let me point out one caveat.

Solving familiar tsumego rapidly depends upon recognition; the problem with that is that humans can recognize a tsumego problem from only relatively few stones in the problem. If the solution depends upon the placement of stones that are not used for recognition, then that practice can lead to mistakes when similar positions arise on the board.

That said, overlearning is good.

[Jujube]

Kirby - it was similar to spaced repetition but not quite. I remember it being particular to baduk / weiqi schools or specific to how students are drilled in solving Go problems. Of course this is based on a source that I read some time ago that may or may not have been well-researched.

Bill - yes I agree, 1001 L+D Problems for example contains many problems where the vital point is not where I think it is!