Life In 19x19

Kirby wrote:

Bill Spight wrote:
You don't have to look. If you have not solved the problem within the time limit, it counts as a failure.

Sure. That's what I meant when I was asking about this:

Kirby wrote: When you say 60% correct, do you mean that you never thought you had the answer for 40% of them?

One thing I learned as a psych major is that learning tasks with about a 50-50 chance of success are generally preferable. I figured that if your chance of success is 60%, you could move on to somewhat more difficult problems. (OC, guaging the difficulty of go problems is hardly exact. But they are rated, FWIW.)

I don't keep track of problems, but get a feel for how many I've gotten wrong. I keep track of how many times I've gone through a book (completely).

If I only went through it half way, and put it down for a while, I'll start back at the beginning. If it hasn't been that long, and I have a bookmark there, then I'll pick it up where I left off (Get Strong at Endgame, I'm looking at you).

Then I just go back and re-read it after it's been a few months. It's a system thats worked well for me.

@Bill Spight: Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Your logic makes a lot of sense here. I also want to point out that the preface in Graded Go Problems for Dan Players suggests 70% as a good "goal", but I sometimes wonder about whether this figure is geared toward the casual player or serious student (and whether there is even a difference between them).

Giving myself a time limit is also a good idea. I am going to do this moving forward to keep things uniform. Also, your suggestion with regard to how many times one should overlearn a problem is a good guideline! I'll be adding that to my process. Thanks!

To your comment about how learning tasks with about a 50-50 chance of success are generally preferable - if you attempt a Go problem once or twice, and you don't see those variations in your head, that sounds to me like you have a 0% chance of success aside from simply guessing. I think what you're talking about here is with the selection of problem sets (a 5kg book versus a 3d book), and I completely agree with that.

Separately, I've found that there are many guides written about how to become shodan, but I've only seen a few written about going from shodan to high dan. I was able to dig up one of them. https://forums.online-go.com/t/repost-t ... t-hard/789 -- this is where I got the 95% number from.

You must choose a proper book for you, don’t choose a very very hard book, if you only can resolve 10% to 20% problems, just abandon it. You should choose a book which you can resolve 60% to 80% problems, do it repeatly until you can easily resolve (clear every variations) more than 95% problems, then you should change a book.

Moving on when one gets to about 65% right in a book seems like a good idea (like Bill suggested), but if one does not properly track one's progress until getting 95% right while working through a new book, it seems likely to lose the edge that comes with being extremely disciplined and accurate with your problem solving (in game or out).

This would not apply to someone who just solves problems for fun. I fully recognize and respect those who solve tsumego because it's a fun activity.

I started working with Graded Go Problems for Dan Player (Vol 1) again, from the beginning, using this process with one modification. I'm marking problems with a O(!) for problems I got right but missed a variation in my mind. Here are the results so far.
http://www.evernote.com/l/AMjUCaw69oVN1 ... LQc06eJ14/

Koosh wrote:[...]but if one does not properly track one's progress until getting 95% right while working through a new book, it seems likely to lose the edge that comes with being extremely disciplined and accurate with your problem solving (in game or out).

I don't track it on a per-problem basis. I work through books in pages. I work through all problems on a given page, reading each one completely (or so I think). Then I go back through each problem on the page take sure I have a clear picture of that solution in my mind (and re-reading the problem if I can't see the solution), before looking at the answers for those problems. It makes it easy to estimate success - did I miss 2 of 18 problems? I'm close to 90%. Miss 5 of 12 problems? I'm only hitting 60%.

And its a lot quicker than tracking specific problems.

Koosh wrote:Separately, I've found that there are many guides written about how to become shodan, but I've only seen a few written about going from shodan to high dan. I was able to dig up one of them. https://forums.online-go.com/t/repost-t ... t-hard/789 -- this is where I got the 95% number from.

You must choose a proper book for you, don’t choose a very very hard book, if you only can resolve 10% to 20% problems, just abandon it. You should choose a book which you can resolve 60% to 80% problems, do it repeatly until you can easily resolve (clear every variations) more than 95% problems, then you should change a book.

Moving on when one gets to about 65% right in a book seems like a good idea (like Bill suggested), but if one does not properly track one's progress until getting 95% right while working through a new book, it seems likely to lose the edge that comes with being extremely disciplined and accurate with your problem solving (in game or out).

To be clear, by move on I do not mean changing books. I mean using a new source for new problems that are a bit harder. (That could be within the same book, such as Maeda's tsumego series.) Keep on reviewing problems you have missed until you get them 100% right, and then review them some more (overlearn them).