I think there is a fine line between greed and efficiency, and both are very different from balance.
Greed is often thought in connection with overplays, as in 'too greedy'.
Efficiency goes in the same direction but not quite so far.
Balance is often thought of as timid play - the idea being of leaving the game result up to opponent mistakes. Not sure this is correct, though.

Ultimately, both efficiency and balance are good - if both players play equally efficient, the balance is preserved. But balance for the sake of balance should not be the goal, I think. Once the enemy makes a move that destroys this balance (like overplay or too slow) - you need to pounce and take advantage. I thought this was the general idea all the time, and I still don't see nothing wrong with that. But maybe I misunderstand.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

Before this gets out of hand, let me try to bring things back in, er, balance.

I used the phrase about greed being good, rashly assuming people would understand the cultural reference as a joke (Gordon Gekko, Wall Street - greed is behind the "upward surge" in human development was the key phrase, I believe). It was also shorthand. Too short, obviously.

So, trying again, and digging back into my possibly unreliable memory of this, Wang Xi (one of the most intellectual pros) argued from the premise that we are typically faced with situations, mostly in the middle game, which are too difficult to read out accurately, but we still have to play something.

He claimed that the typical Japanese response (souba=soba go) would be to make a choice along the lines of "this may not gain me anything, but it won't lose me anything." That's par. Essentially it's risk free.

But the typical Korean approach was quite different. At that time Korean go was in a clear ascendancy (Yi Ch'ang-ho, Cho Hun-hyeon, Yu Ch'ang-hyeok, Seo Pong-su etc) and Chinese players were switching from trying to copy the Japanese to copying the Koreans.

Wang said (always with the proviso I'm not misquoting him) that the Korean approach was to look for an edge by accepting risk, and so if a player felt that he had more than 50% chance of getting an edge and less than 50% chance of losing out, he should consider taking his chances. The considerations are obviously based on things like confidence in one's own play (aka experience) and the overall state of the game or match.

The requirement for this to work, however, is that your assessment of the chances is reliable enough. Underlying this is an important point about risk. There is not just risk in reading out variations accurately. There is risk also in making the risk assessment itself. But it was believed that Yi Ch'ang-ho had found a way of making such assessments reliably (Wang gave an excellent specific example). That improved enormously his chances of succeeding with percentage plays.

Parenthetically, among people who mix up yose and the endgame (i.e. the typical western player), the notion developed that Yi was fantastic at the endgame. He no doubt was, but what he really excelled at was yose, or boundary plays, and the early-game example that Wang gave illustrated just that.

Chinese players ended up copying Korean players and the rest is history. Somebody should also tell the Japanese, and that, it seems to me, is what Ohashi is trying to do when he argues that it is this area in which Japanese pros have to look at in order to catch up (with AI, he says, but by implication, I think, with Chinese and Korean humans).

You can loosely talk (like me) of playing the percentages as greed, or you can call it something else. But whatever you call it, in practical go it has nothing for most of us to do with efficiency.

We can, and do, all make an assessment of our chances whether a particular move works. That's how we play blitz games and how many of us play slow games. Our assessments may be way out of kilter, but we still make them. And if we do improve them, we notice we become stronger, so in that sense they work. So we still play the same probabilistic way most of the time. From my own experience, I have always felt that the level that marks a pro is when you stop relying almost entirely on guesses/probabilities and, instead, play precisely, for par. Ironically, though, it now seems that's a stage you have to go through before you start switching back to playing probabilistically, because that's the only way you can beat people who are also capable of playing a whole round in par.

Assuming that's anything like correct, a principal characteristic of the probabilistic way of playing is that you do your reckoning up in advance. Of course, you may read deeply and back up that information, but the measuring point is at the time you start your manoeuvre.

Efficiency, for most of us us, even pros, is quite different. It is a measure, but we can normally only apply it at the end of the manoeuvre.

Except that it seems that there are geniuses like Dosaku who can apply some sort of measure of efficiency instead at the start of a manoeuvre. If so, that seems a incredible edge.

Again with the proviso that these ramblings do describe anything real, I find it fascinating to speculate on whether AI bots are, in effect, playing probabilistically in typical human fashion, but with better numbers, or are they able to use a measurement of efficiency in advance - or both.

Either way, I think it could be useful to devise a good way of measuring efficiency. Maybe even essential, if we are to get closer to AI play. (And maybe the unit of measurement should be the dosaku )

Not sure if this is the same idea, but I always thought game result SHOULD be left to opponent mistakes. Making good moves, gainful moves is not really possible for obvious reasons (symmetry). The best move is the move that loses nothing, all other are negative. This is on a different level, but when the opponent makes a move that aims to shift balance in his favor, I feel it is a weak move. I may not be able to find it, but there should be a way to exploit. Either he already had the advantage BEFORE that move, or he handed me a way to get it myself. The Korean/Chinese approach (again, not on pro level) seem to pay less attention to realistic or reasonable outcomes.

On pro level even a slight difference in what is reasonable matters, and I doubt it is possible (for humans) to asses the balance that accurately, so ultimately it is matter of style. And once a player thinks he has >50% chance to gain and <50% to lose, the position may already be considered good for him (different balance).

The problem with that argument, is that what we believe is a "realistic or reasonnable outcome" may be suboptimal : a mistake. And those are self punishing and harder to detect.

I think that is the most succinct summary of what is really going on at the end of the day. The perfect player would not have a style, they would simply reflect their opponents mistakes back at them. I'm reminded of Fan Hui 2P's comment in the Alphago documentary that playing against Alphago is like looking in a true mirror. All your flaws are reflected back at you.

Incidentally, at the most recent US Go Congress, Tianfeng Fang 8P made the comment that danger is the default state in go, so safety should be viewed with skepticism. This is the idea behind the recent shift way from the small knight's enclosure to the large knight's enclosure as the norm in professional play.

I'm not sure we are all on the same page in use of terms, but I sense a theoretical tinge to some comments. I think it's important to remember the practical aspect.

When Korean go was in the clear ascendency, there was a strong trend there towards much shorter time limits. China followed to some extent before backtracking.

It would seem that a riskier-in-theory style of play was considered less risky in practice in faster games because it increased the chance of a big mistake by the opponent. Although we often say the loser is the one who makes the last mistake, in pro praxis making the first mistake is probably the real killer.

Even today, when extreme positions have often been retreated from, Korean and Chinese go seems to feature far more resignations than Japanese go.

Japanese players with the luxury of longer time limits have often seemed inclined to strive for par until the endgame allows them to become more precise in their calculations.

Allied to that has been the feeling - less prevalent nowadays but still there - that a game for publication in a newspaper (which the winner might be expected to annotate) must not be spoiled by rashness. The sponsor has to be given his money's worth. In tournaments just designed to find a winner rather than newspaper copy, the style of play can be freer.

Another possible explanation is that, when both players are always playing for par, neither gets much further ahead than the other until the endgame. Either explanation is a subjective generalization.

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