I can't make sense of your post but I like it anyway since I'm quoted in your sig.

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That's exactly the point. Since both are "locally" possible, pure reading will never be able to tell you which one of them is better. You'll just arrive at the conclusion that both are playable. But there are global positions where one is clearly better than the other. I think it's not too far fetched to assume there are global positions where one of these two moves is a game-losing mistake (in high-level play of course).

But of course, reading is still a necessary prerequisite to telling which one of them is better. You can't really make a "strategic" decision between these two moves if you can't read ahead possible continuations and visualize the final positions of each sequence (although that particular position may be a bad example, since we all know what the final positions look like without reading ).

So what's my point? I think you can't really make that distinction between "tactical" and "strategical" decisions. You need to base your strategic decisions on results obtained by reading (e.g. only cut when it's possible). And you need to evaluate the final positions of your reading in terms of strategic aspects (ok, I can cut, but is the result good for me?). And you need strategic decisions to guide your reading (e.g. don't even look for a capturing sequence, because this group is light). And you need reading to guide your strategy (e.g. does my position contain any exploitable flaws, or can I attack freely?).

You'd be surprised how much your reading can be improved by books on Go theory. Reading is a sense of shape, a sense of tesuji, and visualisation skills, of which I would have said the first two of the three comprise 90% of reading ability and are very easy to improve with Go theory books, and the latter is improvable only with practice.

How often have you found a corner/edge shape where you can throw in followed by picking the key eyeshape point in what's left, or something similar? How do you know about the throw in? What about the key eyeshape point, what made you see it? Most of reading can be greatly improved by studying tesuji techniques, and shape techiques (moves that avoid being squeezed for example) as opposed to simply trying one problem after another.

Both strategy and reading/tactics require a fair amount of effort on both the theoretical side and the practical side.

For contrived illustration, try solving the tsumego below (Black to kill):

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Bc Black to kill
$$ - - - - - -
$$ . . X O c d |
$$ . . X O b a |
$$ . . X O O e |
$$ . . X X O O |
$$ . . . X X X |
$$ . . . . . . |
$$ . . . . . . |
$$ . . . . . . |[/go]

How many people read out sequences starting with "b" through to "e" as the first move? If not, why not?

I was sort of debating whether I have anything useful to say or if I am just beating a dead horse anymore, but I think I do, and this post seems the most concise and specific of your posts to reply to.

Yes, heuristics are found in go books. Like blindly following tesuji (which are basically heuristics themselves), they aren't a substitute for good reading. However, strictly on their own terms they're actually quite powerful. You can get to at least SDK by mostly following solid heuristics. Most computer go engines being case in point. And when you do read, you want to start with the heuristics anyway, so you have to learn them eventually.

However, I don't think anyone would call heuristic rules "strategy". They are tactics. I think maybe you misunderstood my original post replying to palapiku, as going back and reading it again I think it's possible to read it as me saying that you don't need to read and can just follow heuristics in books. Especially since before that I had linked "Contact Fights" which is 100% heuristics. But that's not what I meant.

What I meant, and mean, is that it's possible to go the exact opposite extreme and learn go from a "top down" standpoint. Understand the top level strategy of what's going on on the board, on the whole board. When you get out played tactically, if you can turn that loss in to a win, for example by building a strong wall in sente facing an open region, your actual loss on the board is minimal, or you actually come out ahead. Your opponent can feel smugly superior as he destroys position after position, shaking his head and thinking "why hasn't this guy resigned yet", only to find himself at a loss for points at the end.

If your equal rated opponent really understands your tactical weakness, because you play him a lot, he might just start unreasonably invading everywhere and it can be difficult to win like that. You do need points somewhere. But usually, if your opponent can read out a death for his stones, he'll assume (even on a subconcious level) that you can too. So really crazy invasions that might work against you still won't get played, and as long as you know how to direct his weak stones around the board effectively you can still probably win half the time. And really, it's possible to stumble into a kill if your opponent underestimates you too far.

With that solid understanding of the top level, you can go back in and learn how to kill weak groups that you just pushed around before, or how to live with tricky invasions. At the end of the day you're not worse off than those that start "bottom up", since to be good you still need to traverse the entire skill tree. And you probably will pick up some reading ability just by osmosis after playing hundreds of games.

And just for full disclosure: I do maybe 20 problems a day on my iPhone through SmartGo, so I'd be lying if I said I won games only through strategy. I do kill groups from time to time. But my tactical ability is certainly many stones weaker than my KGS rank, because I found it easier to spend a few hours reading things on strategy than I did on problems. So study whichever aspect of the game you enjoy, and just watch for a plateau signalling that you need to switch to something else to progress.

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Who says reading can't be global?

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I disagree with Numsgil's assessment. Strategy and tactics maybe regarded as different ends of a spectrum, but they are not equal partners. Tactics is the building block, they most intimately deal with the basic rules of the game: captures, liberties and life and death. Strategy is used to help us think about situations that are several times removed - but nonetheless derived from - those basic rules.

In this sense, tactics informs strategy, but not the other way round. All strategy can be seen as heuristics. They are rules to help you get ahead when your reading is insufficient. However having a bad tactical base leads to you making poorer strategical decisions because your inherent assumptions on how situations can turn out are wrong.

When I was in China I had the privilege of listening to a teacher explain to his 1d-3d students a new, korean joseki. Apparently this joseki evolved because pros did not like the ladder implications of the standard old joseki. A very much tactical consideration, but it is hugely important to initial strategy and fuseki considerations. I realized right then that the stronger you are, the more you see the board in terms of an integrated fight, rather than local tactical situations somehow connected by strategy. Your strategy can only be that good depending on your tactical and fighting strength.

I'm not really strong enough to remark myself on the subject matter, but I am curious how those strongly advocating reading as the primary determinant of strength explain the difficulty of creating a strong Go-playing computer, considering that one would expect computers are capable of reading at least an order of magnitude further than any pro (and that's probably a gross underestimate).

Of course, pure global reading with enough brute processing power would render strategy entirely meaningless but computers aren't at that level and humans certainly never will be. So what overrides the reading gap between a powerful computer and a strong human player? Subtractively, wouldn't this supplement account for the several ranks between the strongest human player and the strongest computer? And considering that humans won't ever catch up in reading to a computer doesn't that mean that there is a point at which reading will no longer carry a human player forward?

The tree-trimmer.

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Reading involves not only considering different variations, but also knowing when to stop, and which variations not to read at all because they're stupid (the technical term for this is "pruning"). Humans are very good at discarding stupid move sequences, and computers are very bad. Since the go board is so big, this is a big problem (unlike Chess, where considering ALL moves many turns ahead is a reality).

"Reading", "tactics", "strategy" are all human-specific terms, and saying "computers are strong at reading" is trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Monadology: the branching factor in Go is terrible, and even single digit kyus can occasionally get into circumstances where we read 15 moves. Of course we don't read multiple variations for each of those moves we rely on intuition, but that's part of what's hard for a computer, and it's considered a part of reading. Something like a hane and connect on the second line--we might not consider a variation, but it's a place where a computer doesn't have the same ability to make shortcuts.

For that reason, the strongest go playing programs are based on Monte-Carlo algorithms. http://senseis.xmp.net/?MonteCarlo

(I see I've typed up the same thing Palapiku wrote while I was composing this. I'd just add that "computers are good at reading" is a perfectly sensible thing to say about the most similar game we have: chess. It just relies on assumptions that don't apply to Go.)

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I'm fully aware of the branching problems but I don't buy this.

This appears to me like you're smuggling something else into reading which is why what computers do doesn't fit the concept. You even gave it a name: Pruning. In any case, it's more useful if we divide it up for the sake of the thought experiment:

How does one determine good pruning? Retorting 'good reading' is question begging. Tactical heuristics regarding eye shape for instance? That seems like it makes sense to me.

But what about non-local moves, over on the other side of the board. We prune on a global scale too. Wouldn't that be strategy and isn't it pretty important?

I can't believe I'm the only person here that does "reading" in fuseki mentally placing stones all over the board??

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I try to do it methodically. Black A1, White B1. Hm, interesting. Now, how about, Black A1, White C1. Getting better...

That would be pretty odd alright.

Maybe it's more like they don't think strength of reading is as important because one isn't reading in extreme depth, and one will play better fuseki if one plays a consistent and intelligent strategy which is supported by reading and good choice of local play/joseki (instead of the other way around).

It's really hard to say though. Everyone seems to be using terms differently (myself included).

Pros do read the fuseki to extreme depth (and breadth), that's why they spend so much time on it.

It was my understanding that this whole discussion spiraled not about whether or not it was necessary to do serious and in-depth reading at pro-level play, but whether or not it was possible to advance through much of the kyu ranks by focusing on developing strength in making strategic judgments (of the negative pruning variety and presumably also the positive selective variety). Also on whether or not reading and tactics needed the supplement of strategic strength to get to very high levels of play.

In kyu ranks it's certainly possible to get ahead of an opponent with stronger reading by having a better idea of strategy, and win that way.

But really this is just trickery - the reason you'd win would be because your opponent is playing suboptimally against you. Playing optimally would require him to start a huge fight right away and take advantage of his better fighting skills. The reason he doesn't do that (assuming he wants to win) is just because he's not aware of your tactical disadvantage or its implications. Once the opponent adjusts to you, you're toast. Of course, playing online, on a peaceful server (KGS), this may never happen. In effect, your opponents are being unreasonably nice to you.

This is why people are surprised by their rank drop when they play on a Chinese or Korean server. People there fight more.

Well, there are a lot of posts about this, and I don't feel particularly argumentative at the moment.

It doesn't really matter to me how strategy is defined. I think my main point is that, personally, I do not find it useful to study go theory at all, really. When I have seen improvement in my game, it is from reading.

Sometimes this reading is global, and sometimes local...

But if you want to study something, forget theory books and do some go problems. That's what's worked for me so far.

Studying go theory just makes me sleepy.

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I will reply to this one, though. You can achieve this by simply doing go problems. You don't need to read a theory book to tell you where the key points are.

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Reading does help.

I once had an amusing game against a 6D with a bulky five in the corner. It was all that remained of the eye space of a rather large group of his. I, of course, had played in the vital point.
That group of his was surrounded by an even larger group of mine which had no eye space at all. It had six external liberties. He knew, without reading, that filling a bulky five takes 8 moves. I had played one move at the vital point. So he figured that he was ahead, 7 liberties to 6.
I hadn't memorized the numbers. So I read it out. I came up with a different count. I thought that I was ahead.

The remainder of the game was bizarre. We both belived that we were the winner of a 100+ point fight, and that the other guy really ought to resign. Both of us were too polite to request that the other do it. He played wild hyper-aggressive attacks. I defended, conceding a point here and there just to guarantee stability. I assumed that he was making desperate attempts to get back in the game. He - as he told me later - figured that the game was decided in his favor and that he would test out a few ideas on attacking.

You see, in a corner, a bulky five requires only four moves to kill:

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Bc Black to kill
$$ - - - - - -
$$ . . X O b . |
$$ . . X O a X |
$$ . . X O O c |
$$ . . X X O O |
$$ . . . X X X |
$$ . . . . . . |
$$ . . . . . . |
$$ . . . . . . |[/go]

I knew this because I had read it out. He didn't because he had relied on memorized numbers. When I played 'a', he resigned.

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