Re kakoi and psychology:
I was looking for a book yesterday and just happened to come across the manga Hoshizora no Karasu. I flipped through the first few pages to refresh my memory, and of course came across my alter ego, the grumpy old grandpa pro who just does want to baby-sit little Waka - 'ttaku washi wa gaki no o-mamori nazo shitake nee ga). But he does so by teaching her how to be play go to pro level. But in the robust but subtle way of times of yore - no snowflakes allowed here! On the one hand he lets her help by finding the black moves (the ones hard to read) on a game record he wants to play over, while on the other he bellows at her at the little brat (gaki): "Koko washi no jinchi, kokorahen mo wasi no" - this is MY territory, and all this around here too!
But what really caught my eye (obviously because the skilled manga artist so designed the page) was Waka telling grandpa she understood one important piece of advice: Always only play moves that have an effect on your opponent.
In a way that's trite advice, so obvious that ... Well, so obvious that we keep ignoring it.
But we also ignore it in two different ways. One is just plain forgetting it. The other is more subtle - we are aware of it but deliberately override it. This comes up a lot with prophylactic moves, of which kakoi is one.
There is a nexus of such moves. It includes, in what may be regarded as an ascending scale, mamori (not baby-sitting here but with interesting associations, and at least the easiest to understand), honte, and kakoi - the hardest to understand.
Honte is somewhere in the middle in that it's not too hard to understand, but at the same time it's not too hard either to make a mess of it. Hane Naoki recently wrote a book about honte in which he castigated the "fake honte". This is a safe, solid move that actually doesn't have any effect on the opponent. It is a showboating, grandstanding, or as the ancient Chinese masters would say, a move that looks full but is empty.
One reason that kakoi is so hard is that it is difficult to play it in such a way that it has an effect on the opponent. And this is actually hard even for top pros. Here's a famous example with some AI insight.
In 2011 (i.e. pre AI times) Iyama played the triangle move below. It caused a bit of a sensation at the time as it was a title match and the analysis team in the press room were astounded by it. It was dubbed an "Ear reddening move of the Modern Era".
In Iyama's game, he played the triangled stone to force A and then he surrounded at B.
This same position was recently put to a group of pros. None of them got Iyama's move, but a couple of stronger pros (e.g. an 8-dan) got a similar idea - a move in the same area but not s effective, e.g. G).
Weaker pros such as little Sumire and Ueno Asami opted for E, and in Sumire's case this was combined with an aim at I. Another young pro suggested F with a similar idea. We are talking about moves here that DO have an effect on the opponent, but maybe we should say "impact" rather than "effect" - the effect is too blatant, in a way. Iyama's way was more subtle. H was another youngster's unsubtle choice.
The strongest player, Yuki Satoshi 9-dan, chose the subtlest way: C, expecting White to defend at the triangled point, and then D - surrounding on a truly large scale in which the future effect on the opponent is actually rather hard to see.
But we can assume there was an impact, because modern AI analysis points that way.
I didn't spend much time on it, but LeelaZero naturally liked the 3-3 point in the lower left. Apart from being a stylistic quirk this can be seen as an extemporising move - at some point attention has to revert to the top of the board. And even at this stage, LZ did rate moves in that area highly.
It liked B and C very much. But it also had a soft spot for Iyama's move. The more time it spent analysing, the more time it spent on that move. It did not move up enough to become the "decision move" in the time I spent on it, but it was very much a strong candidate move. None of the moves the younger pros put forward appeared in LZ's list of candidates. Of course the 9-dan, Yuki, was vindicated, too.
Let us switch now to psychology.
I think we can sum up the AI-human dichotomy as follows:
* The bot says "I want to choose the move that gives me the best winning ratio, full stop." * The human says "I want to choose the move that gives me the best winning ratio, but which is also a move that I can understand."
In other words, my interpretation is that the human is willing to sacrifice some hidden subtlety in return for keeping some sort of grip on the game. But Iyama (and Yuki) saw deeper than younger pros and didn't have to sacrifice quite as much subtlety as them.
Reverting to kakoi, I think one reason it is so hard a concept is that it is hard to find out where its hidden subtlety lies. In part, I believe, this is because people tend to think about the present and the future more than the past. They look at a kakoi move (or any move, come to that) and say, "What effect does it have now?" or, if you are a pro, "What effect could this have in the future?"
Both questions are valid, but there is a third aspect, which, it seems to me, even pros ignore. "What effect will the stones I have already played have if I don't play this kakoi?" In other words, you have to protect what you have already invested. As I have repeated ad nauseam in the past, thickness is only thickness if you can use it as thickness. And the bots have shown us, via the Direct 3-3, that joseki thickness is often not true thickness. If you can attack it, with guerilla tactics, or like a pack of wolves, soon enough, it ends up as a pile of skeletons.
If I may go off on a bit of a tangent now, and pick up on mamori - again not the baby-sitting variety. Its commonest use is as a prophylactic defence of the corner. By chance, I just read this morning an article by Shibano Toramaru in which he explains why the tsukeosae joseki has gone right out of fashion in the AI era. He doesn't use the word mamori, but I think we can see this joseki as having an effect similar to a mamori move (that is the point of the osae block, after all). However, one reason the mamori is so easy to understand (and play) is that its effect is easy to understand: it affects the corner and not (or hardly) the opponent. That is why it is at the bottom of the prophylaxis nexus. Shibano's explanation is that the joseki is bad precisely because it doesn't have enough effect on the opponent.
So, in a nutshell, we come back to what grandpa says: "Always only play moves that have an effect on your opponent." Add subtlety for seasoning depending how many Michelin stars you want to win.
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