John Fairbairn wrote:
Fujisawa does not give explicit names to shapes, but far from being a drawback that is a big plus in my opinion. The obsession with shapes is a major fault in western go. It leads to an obsession with the static over the dynamic, which haengma partly addresses by going the other way.
Fair enough. By the way, recommended link for
Shape Up! would be
https://cdn.online-go.com/shape_up.pdf"Shape Up!" was written as a "second book of go", to follow
Teach Yourself Go, which is now called
Be a Master at Go: Teach Yourself. I would first like to say that even if you read both books, you cannot expect to be a master. You might get up to about 2
kyu, with a bit more opening theory?
The first book names the empty triangle and the bamboo joint. As a
teaching strategy, giving things names is by no means pointless. Teaching can be criticised if it leads to a further requirement of heavy "unlearning", which is the sort of point John is making here. So, one does have to learn about good empty triangles, and shortage of liberties caused by bamboo joints.
Part of the back story of
Shape Up! was feedback from Richard Bozulich, including the gem that it would need revision because
on the same page you were shown a given shape working/not working. Well, I would defend that kind of anti-doctrinaire approach, to this day.
There was a time when I did a lot of teaching, and I learned that giving names to things that were otherwise anonymous could help, in moderation. (If we didn't talk about "playing under the stones", for example, it would remain a "one-of-those"? A snapback is not a ko, and we need different recapture words.)
Now I tried to teach shape. I tried not to teach
joseki, and I think seeing players around 1
dan or 2
dan suffering sclerosis of the opening because they are sure there are advantages in certain types of shape-fixing
joseki is just rather sad.
The Michael Redmond Master Series commentaries are pretty interesting from this point of view. E.g.
The pro plays the shape move and it is wrong.
The machine plays non-joseki and gets a good result in the particular position.
The pros persist in trying further variations in what is a busted opening. Go teachers recognise this as the "what if?" moment, where you are making teaching point A, and the pupil wants to pick holes in it.
The examples of machine haengma applied in Magic Sword variations seem very suggestive.
Some new AI joseki look like that ropy concept "middle game joseki" done right very early on.
Sente matters! While some of the new ideas are to be found in late-period Kitani Minoru, his version of taking gote in some classic lines is a trade of time for thick shape that presumably is not going to be revived.
In short, if you want to explain go via standard patterns on sub-boards, you will have trouble at the higher levels. If you teach patterns rigidly, you may be storing up trouble later on, like ama 5
dans suffering from systematic errors. But I can't agree with junking the whole apparatus of shape-recognition and its articulation. It contains, as the traditional go proverbs do, valuable heuristics.