Life In 19x19

If you don't want to do that kind of training alone you can try to start a guessing contest here on the forum.

I am so turned on by this idea, that I feel the need to clarify once again: It is not about guessing the move the professional made, it's about thinking about and improving your own reasoning. One is not trying to guess correctly, but rather to evaluate one's own decisions by comparing them to the decision a professional made in exactly the same situation. Because of this, there is no reason to use a program such as goscorer. These sort of programs are great for guessing how a pro plays - but for the purpose of this exercise, any old sgf viewer will do. The goal is to become aware of the shortcomings of one's own reasoning, so instead of guessing until you find the move the pro decided on, it's better to just choose one move yourself and then compare it to the move the pro chose. I assure you, practically every move can offer you an insight about your game.

I am so turned on by this idea, that I feel the need to clarify once again: It is not about guessing the move the professional made, it's about thinking about and improving your own reasoning. One is not trying to guess correctly, but rather to evaluate one's own decisions by comparing them to the decision a professional made in exactly the same situation. Because of this, there is no reason to use a program such as goscorer. These sort of programs are great for guessing how a pro plays - but for the purpose of this exercise, any old sgf viewer will do. The goal is to become aware of the shortcomings of one's own reasoning, so instead of guessing until you find the move the pro decided on, it's better to just choose one move yourself and then compare it to the move the pro chose. I assure you, practically every move can offer you an insight about your game.

Although this is brimming with good sense, I'm not sure that it quite hits the mark. My own observations of how pros learn suggests that there are two separate processes: absorption and adsorption.

First, for the purpose of exposition, assume simply that we have a subconscious part of the brain and a conscious one. Go uses both. The subconscious part is good at absorbing information in large quantities and sorting it, creating useful links and networks while you sleep. To feed this beast, you simply expose it to lots and lots of game records. The ideal state for doing this appears to be NOT to study a single game in the way you suggest, but simply to play it over, fairly briskly but not rushing, in a state of "No Mind" (i.e. not letting the conscious brain have a look-in). The end result is that when it comes to playing a game yourself, this subconscious beast, or intuition, will say things like, "I've seen this before - this is what happens next" or "I've seen something similar - try X, Y and Z." The more games you absorb in this way, the better the advice your intuition will give you." Most pros seem to pick a favourite collection (e.g. games of Yasui Chitoku) and play these over repeatedly, otherwise they just absorb new game after new game. As far as I can make out, though, the repetition of a favourite set is less about creating new networks in the brain and more about strengthening certain links so as to create a stylistic bias, so that when the beast throws up its suggestions, these will be biased towards a style you admire, prefer or aspire to.

The conscious part of the brain seems to be developed in a different way, which I call adsorption. Here, you are not packing your brain with data, but you simply allow data to attach to your pre-processor, where you mull it over, test it, and maybe reject it. The end result here is like a bee turning nectar into honey. This "essence" is then packed into the deeper part of the brain, more as a programming module than as pure data of the absorbed type. Data is swallowed wholesale; essence is digested first.

Again with the caveat that this is only what I have gleaned from talking to pros or reading accounts of their formative years, the adsorption process seems to be divided into three approaches. One (the main one, I think) is to attend a study group with students of similar strength and to toss ideas back and forwards, typically by group-studying a single game. I don't recall a single instance of tossing ideas back and forwards like this with a teacher.

A second approach is to study by oneself but in this case it seems relatively rare to study a whole single game. Instead, the student will study one part of one game (e.g. trying to read out a major fight), or will study a set of games by looking at a related theme (e.g. building moyos) in each. In the latter case, the more advanced students (meaning also established high dans) seem to focus on assessing other players' styles, and so act in a kind of GoScorer mode, but with the important difference that they guess only moves at critical points (i.e. those where a true choice - style - exists). Again the emphasis is on distilling an essence which can later be sent to the deeper brain.

The third approach is to have a teaching game. In other words, you get some external help with your moonshine distilling skills!

It is my strong impression that the most difficult part of this whole process is not the adsorption part, where (for adults, at least) reasoning and experience from other fields can be applied, but the absorption part. To some extent this can be said to be difficult for busy adults because the time required to play over a large number of games can seem immense, but I don't think that's the real problem. The real problem is achieving the state of No Mind, i.e. abandoning attempts to reason or to actively memorise. Indeed, if this state of No Mind can be achieved, the number of games to play over can be made rather small - usually 1,000 for 1-dan is quoted but I've seen 10,000 for 5-dan.

If my analysis is right, daal's approach seems to mix absorption and adsorption (not a good idea, as a working assumption). It also explains why blitz games are not a great idea either for players who are still at the stage where data absorption is needed. - the actual playing of the game uses the front part of the brain, is distracting and prevents No Mind (which is different from the mindlessness usually associated with blitz, of course). It may also explain to some degree why young children have an advantage - perhaps they are better at achieving No Mind.

If you are not familiar with No Mind, it goes by lots of other names and phrases in the Far East, especially on fans signed by go pros e.g. Stone Mind, Bare Mind, No Self, No Gates, Cleansing the Mind, Child-like Mind, Pure and Empty, Innocent and Unworldly, Stiffened Bones and Empty Mind, Interference-free Thoughts, Clearing the Mind, Calming Oneself, Observing Calmly is Beneficial to Oneself.... I am quoting mainly from a pile of fans behind me and could add quite a few more, but I imagine you've already got the message that No Mind is a very important concept to a pro.

There are even Japanese pros who - shock, horror - think that amateurs take no notice of this advice. From memory, I think it was Miyamoto Naoki who came up with a nice joke about this on one fan for amateurs. Instead of writing the usual characters for Musou to mean No Thoughts, he wrote characters that meant Dream Thoughts, which is what most amateur attempts end up as. In similar vein, the shogi pro Aono Teruichi once told me that pros regard amateur thinking time as dreaming time - meaning (once he'd stopped wetting himself with laughing) that instead of thinking they should spend more time just absorbing data.

Remarkable similarities to (other) martial arts. So probably there also is a culturell aspect involved, meaning the way one is trained / raised to think. I guess the way I as an European learned to think is just the opposite of "No Mind" (Locke, Descartes and Kant all would have been lousy go players, that's for sure ).

John Fairbairn wrote:
First, for the purpose of exposition, assume simply that we have a subconscious part of the brain and a conscious one. Go uses both. The subconscious part is good at absorbing information in large quantities and sorting it, creating useful links and networks while you sleep. To feed this beast, you simply expose it to lots and lots of game records. The ideal state for doing this appears to be (...) simply to play it over, fairly briskly but not rushing, in a state of "No Mind" (i.e. not letting the conscious brain have a look-in). The end result is that when it comes to playing a game yourself, this subconscious beast, or intuition, will say things like, "I've seen this before - this is what happens next" or "I've seen something similar - try X, Y and Z." The more games you absorb in this way, the better the advice your intuition will give you." Most pros seem to pick a favourite collection (e.g. games of Yasui Chitoku) and play these over repeatedly, otherwise they just absorb new game after new game. As far as I can make out, though, the repetition of a favourite set is less about creating new networks in the brain and more about strengthening certain links so as to create a stylistic bias, so that when the beast throws up its suggestions, these will be biased towards a style you admire, prefer or aspire to.

This is actually quite close to how I envision my exercise. It takes about as much time to replay a game in this manner as playing a regular game - which for most of us would probably qualify as "brisk." Also, the idea is also more about absorbing a large amount of content than about thoroughly analyzing each move or situation. It also would make sense to choose games by a particular player to get a better handle on a certain type of play.

Not being a professional go player, I can't say what goes through their minds when they simply play over a game in a state of "No Mind," but I am fairly sure that were I to try it, I would absorb next to nothing. Without some effort to put the moves into a context, they are practically meaningless to me. It is like trying to eavesdrop on a conversation in a language one barely knows. I suspect that the pro's ability to absorb information from a game is much more efficient due to his fluency in the language of the stones.

To continue with the language metaphor - which I admit gets a bit stretched - imagine having learned some vocabulary of a language, without knowing its grammar. This exercise should help you learn to express yourself. When postulating a move, it is like trying to formulate an idea, and the pro's move is like hearing a better sentence spoken correctly. The hope is that by doing this often enough, one might learn as if by immersion.

While such an exercise might appear to the go professional sadly remedial, for a go immigrant such as myself, I have hopes that it's a step towards literacy. For a wide variety of reasons, the learning methods of professionals are not applicable to many of us. Nonetheless, I find your above description to some extent analogous to my approach. It's just for a different clientele. Not "No Mind" and not "Dreaming Mind" but perhaps ... "Open Mind?"

daal wrote: To continue with the language metaphor - which I admit gets a bit stretched - imagine having learned some vocabulary of a language, without knowing its grammar. This exercise should help you learn to express yourself. When postulating a move, it is like trying to formulate an idea, and the pro's move is like hearing a better sentence spoken correctly. The hope is that by doing this often enough, one might learn as if by immersion.

Sometimes when I'm writing text in another language, I'll have a phrase that I've constructed, which I want to use. It seems to make sense, but I want to double check it. So, I'll go to a search engine and paste the phrase there. If I get a lot of search results that match the phrase I came up with, I feel a bit more confident that the phrase may be correct, because it's aligned with what a lot of other "pros" in that language have used. OTOH, if I don't get many results, or if I get results showing different ways of saying something similar, I try to see why this is, and it's sometimes educational.

This doesn't always work, because sometimes my sentence is about something rare or not widely spoken about. Still, for some common expressions, it seems useful.

To me, this is kind of related to the example you've provided of "hearing a better sentence spoken correctly", and I agree. It is helpful.

Sometimes, though, I feel it is more efficient to just read books in the language I'm trying to learn. It's true that I can pick a particular instance of a sentence and test it out against what native speakers used. But if you read entire books, you get exposure to - a lot of sentences, and I think that it's very helpful.

So I don't know if learning go fits with the language-learning metaphor exactly. But if it does, maybe it would be good to just play through lots and lots of games (analogous, perhaps, to reading lots of books), and then if you are curious about a particular position, do a pattern search and see what a pro did in that situation (maybe analogous to searching online for a sentence you're trying to construct).

That being said, there are probably many ways to skin a cat. So the way that I learn language or go or whatever may be entirely different than what's most efficient for you.

Kirby wrote: So I don't know if learning go fits with the language-learning metaphor exactly. But if it does, maybe it would be good to just play through lots and lots of games (analogous, perhaps, to reading lots of books)...

That is what I want to do. But because of my poor command of the language, if I read too fast, I understand too little. I feel the need for a structure that requires me to move slowly enough to at least pronounce words correctly and try to recall their meaning.

...and then if you are curious about a particular position, do a pattern search and see what a pro did in that situation (maybe analogous to searching online for a sentence you're trying to construct).That being said, there are probably many ways to skin a cat. So the way that I learn language or go or whatever may be entirely different than what's most efficient for you.

Yes, this is the case. For me "playing through a pro game" is quite similar to "playing through a ddk game." Maybe I'll notice something interesting, maybe I won't. Digging into a database is a bit like using a dictionary: It helps to clarify something specific, but can also hinder the flow of reading. By thinking about what I would do at each juncture, the meaning of the game move becomes more apparent. It's as if the pro were making a special effort to enunciate. To return again to John's comment about No Mind, looking at a game in this manner lets me stay with the flow of the game, and I do think that this is for me an efficient way of absorbing at least part of what a professional thinks.

Not being a professional go player, I can't say what goes through their minds when they simply play over a game in a state of "No Mind," but I am fairly sure that were I to try it, I would absorb next to nothing. Without some effort to put the moves into a context, they are practically meaningless to me. It is like trying to eavesdrop on a conversation in a language one barely knows. I suspect that the pro's ability to absorb information from a game is much more efficient due to his fluency in the language of the stones.

I can't be sure either, but I do think this is completely the wrong approach because you seem to be looking for an immediate or visible result. To continue your language analogy (which works best if you consider your own language, which as an adult you are still learning, rather than a foreign one), if you expose yourself to lots of new vocabulary you don't expect to be able to use all these words yourself. Many words you are happy just to recognise - your passive vocabulary. More to the point, you do not ponderously analyse the words as you learn them: you do not actively say to yourself things like, "This is a mass noun, this is a common word, this is used only in a literary context, this means the same as X". Instead you let the Beast Within (the subconscious) take care of all of that for you. Once in a while the Beast will toss something back at you that doesn't seem to fit, or a teacher will bring something to your attention. For example, you learn a new noun and the Beast just assumes on your behalf that the plural ends in 's', but then you come across the word 'sheep' and sense or are told that the plural is sheep. You can just accept that, store it away in the Beast and get on with real life. Or you can be like many amateur go players and go through a dictionary and make a list of all words that have irregular plurals, learning in the process words you will never use and confusing yourself because you come across even more irregular irregularities such as 'data/data' or 'datum/data' as singular or plural or ten mile/ten miles (Scots/English). And if you have the extra nerdy kind of go player mentality you will then start trying to devise a theory as to why these irregular irregularities exist, and meanwhile real life floats on by...

No Mind is a state of alertness but with no barriers interposed that prevent efficient absorption. The commonest barrier in the Zen tradition is probably desire, which may most often equate to ratings obsession in go, though at the more mundane extreme things like tiredness have an impact, of course. As a practical step to achieving No Mind, I believe patience is the virtue to cultivate, because there is a large element of faith involved as regards when and how you will get the results, especially as you are surrendering control to the Beast. But it has to be true patience: not the "God grant me patience. And I want it now!" type.

I think this can be especially difficult in, and maybe too exotic for, a western society where we are often taught to set goals, achieve targets, tick boxes, all preferably done in a hurry in the false name of efficiency. But the irony is that if you are brought up to measure things by results, you have to conclude that, for the moment at least, the results tell us that in go it is better to be Way-oriented rather than Goal-oriented. Perhaps go is just too complex to fall to the analyse and conquer approach.

I'll have to say what John is getting at is perhaps the correct approach. I've done just problems and replaying game records only for about a week, but I've felt myself getting stronger in the game, despite my recent string of losses on IGS.

Perhaps go is just too complex to fall to the analyse and conquer approach.

This has been proven true time and time again. Even in so Western a game as chess or draughts, a theoretical approach can, at best, point out a good point of departure for one to begin learning what needs to be learned. Even with a good theory in place, one still has to put in the hours I sometimes wonder if one can get good at chess simply by replaying game records when one is not playing actual games.

I think this can be especially difficult in, and maybe too exotic for, a western society where we are often taught to set goals, achieve targets, tick boxes, all preferably done in a hurry in the false name of efficiency. But the irony is that if you are brought up to measure things by results, you have to conclude that, for the moment at least, the results tell us that in go it is better to be Way-oriented rather than Goal-oriented. Perhaps go is just too complex to fall to the analyse and conquer approach.

I would say that Go has refined my goal-oriented views, namely in aiming to solving a problem without creating new ones. In fact, my way of thinking has been so deeply influenced by the game that some people say I overthink things!

The most interesting discussion I have read so far! Please don't stop!
Being really bad at go but good at drawing I might say that at drawing / sketching an alert state of not analysing is the right state of mind. There might be a connection with go because go is also a very visual thing. The right hemisphere of the brain (that's the one which does not analyse but just "sees" and absorbes) should be heavly involved.

Martin1974 wrote:The most interesting discussion I have read so far! Please don't stop!
Being really bad at go but good at drawing I might say that at drawing / sketching an alert state of not analysing is the right state of mind. There might be a connection with go because go is also a very visual thing. The right hemisphere of the brain (that's the one which does not analyse but just "sees" and absorbes) should be heavly involved.

Don't restrict yourself to thinking it of as just a visual thing. Remember how languages work. We don't analyse we just know when we're truly fluent in a language. We absorb passively, we don't focus on new words and go "I must remember that," we just see it again and remember. Go is fascinating since it seems to mimic many "natural" tasks for the mind (language, mathematical intuition and so on).

Boidhere, as a beginner I have not the least clue what go is all about, but surely I guessed as much that it's not only visual. In fact that's preciesly why I tend to think that go is NOT the right hobby for me. I allways was hopeless in mathematics and languages and my measured IQ is in fact sub average. I'm here just for a curious glance into another world.

Martin1974 wrote:Boidhere, as a beginner I have not the least clue what go is all about, but surely I guessed as much that it's not only visual. In fact that's preciesly why I tend to think that go is NOT the right hobby for me. I allways was hopeless in mathematics and languages and my measured IQ is in fact sub average. I'm here just for a curious glance into another world.

Martin, please do not be too swayed by speculation. In the West, go players tend to be good at mathematics, but that may be a historical accident. I do not think that that is so in the East, which has many more players. As for IQ, I expect that the story will be similar to chess, so that there would be a weak relationship. I once took an IQ test where one of the tasks was to use blocks to recreate patterns. I did very well on that task, and I suspect that that may have something to do with my ability at go. I once knew a PhD in chemistry who was a terrible bridge player, though an avid one. I do think that learning go is a lot like learning a first language. That's not saying much, since learning a first language is the gold standard of learning, and the prime prototype. Learning a second language is another question. The main problem most people encounter is not learning vocabulary, but learning grammar. But there really is not much that you could call grammar at go. The difference between sente and gote is sort of like grammar, I suppose. Learning patterns is like learning vocabulary. In fact, go has an extensive terminology of patterns. In your case, anybody who can come up with, "Life is a metaphor for go," shows both creativity and a mastery of language.

Martin1974 wrote:[..] my measured IQ is in fact sub average. [..]

Please forget about all this IQ bullshit immediately.

ALL the instruments designed to “measure” “intelligence” (yes, quotation marks around both) are … inadequate for assessing what really is. They can only measure how fast an individual can solve so-and-so stupid tasks under stress, and both the tasks as well as the evaluation are designed by humans who are limited in their thinking just as well as you and me. The people who design so-called “IQ Tests” are NOT Nobel Prize winners, nor are those who evaluate them. All they can think of is … verbal “intelligence”, mathematical “intelligence”, technical “intelligence”, logical “intelligence”. So-called social intelligence or emotional intelligence are usually way outside of their areas of imagination.

We must not let ourselves be judged—and limited!—by technocrat assholes. (Please forgive me this use of language, but I tend to get angry when it get to this topic )

I have worked with young people who actually believed they were dumb, i.e. they had been told they were dumb all their lives, everybody around them believed they were dumb (and I can only guess how many of the people who judged thusly were dumb themselves). Some of them had visited “special schools”, and with bad results. And what I found was that most of them seemed “more intelligent” as soon as the person communicating with them assumed them to be smarter than people before had assumed. What a satisfaction for me, what a joy, to find that I could push some of them towards new borders, new schools, new goals. One of the greatest experiences in my life was when one of them later came across the yard of the adult education institution where I taught, hand stretched out, face grinning, and telling me, “I just graduated from high school, thanks for expecting more from me than others did.”

“In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind there are no limits.”
—John C. Lilly, M.D, in “Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer: Theory and Experiments”

“If I call an idiot “idiot”, and the idiot is two metres tall and one-and-a-half metre broad and stands at arm’s length from me, who’s really the idiot? All I achieve by this is to hurt the other person and perhaps provoke idiotic behaviour.”
—Thomas Rohde (that’s me)




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Actually, my wording “push some of them towards new borders [..]” is wrong, I never pushed, I never HAD to push, it was rather that I tried to remind them that the only real obstacles are in our own minds. So I perhaps just scratched a bit on the dam that blocked the flow, so that the flow could move on.

</edit>

Bonobo wrote:

Martin1974 wrote:[..] my measured IQ is in fact sub average. [..]

Please forget about all this IQ bullshit immediately.

ALL the instruments designed to “measure” “intelligence” (yes, quotation marks around both) are … inadequate for assessing what really is. They can only measure how fast an individual can solve so-and-so stupid tasks under stress, and both the tasks as well as the evaluation are designed by humans who are limited in their thinking just as well as you and me. The people who design so-called “IQ Tests” are NOT Nobel Prize winners, nor are those who evaluate them. All they can think of is … verbal “intelligence”, mathematical “intelligence”, technical “intelligence”, logical “intelligence”. So-called social intelligence or emotional intelligence are usually way outside of their areas of imagination.

I completely agree agree with everything Bonobo has said (and wish I could give it more than one like), and just want to add that these tests aren't even good for assessing the types of intelligence they aim to test. All of the tasks they set require learned skills to complete, so all they can really tell you is what a person has learned. If people led the exact same lives it might be reasonable to assume that learned more = more intelligent, but there are so many other factors that it's just nonsensical to view what someone has learned as an accurate measure of what they're capable of learning.