Life In 19x19

John Fairbairn wrote:

Visualisation/visualization means having a mental representation of stone positions. For me, it doesn't mean I can see black and white stones, I can only see gray shadows. Other people's brains work differently.

Is this (working differently) really true?

Yes, it is. There is a lot more literature on the subject now than there used to be when I first realized that I couldn't visualize around 20 years ago. The condition now has a name, aphantasia, searching for which will lead you to plenty of writing on the subject. In short, there is a continuum of visualization all the way from "sees and manipulates images in their head perfectly clearly" down to "sees only black when they close their eyes". From your description of your own experiences, it sounds like you are maybe slightly below the median in this ability, whereas I and jlt are way down at the bottom. (My "auralization" abilities are excellent, so I have a sense of what it is like to be good at this sort of projected imagination.)

I do agree that reading/calculation in Go/chess is not entirely a matter of visualization; otherwise I would be hopeless at both games. The kind of pattern recognition and chunking you bring up describes my experience as well. Another thing that works for me is to classify configurations of stones/pieces so that I can identify the contents of a point/square by working out how it relates to one of the configurations.

dfan wrote:I do agree that reading/calculation in Go/chess is not entirely a matter of visualization; otherwise I would be hopeless at both games. The kind of pattern recognition and chunking you bring up describes my experience as well. Another thing that works for me is to classify configurations of stones/pieces so that I can identify the contents of a point/square by working out how it relates to one of the configurations.

In order to think concretely about go, chess, tic-tac-toe, Othello, etc., you have to have some kind of mental image. That does not necessarily involve the visual cortex. But you need to have a representation of the state of the game. When I talk about visualizing the goal position, I do not mean seeing stones on the board, or a go diagram. I do mean having a mental image of some sort.

Bill Spight wrote:In order to think concretely about go, chess, tic-tac-toe, Othello, etc., you have to have some kind of mental image. That does not necessarily involve the visual cortex. But you need to have a representation of the state of the game. When I talk about visualizing the goal position, I do not mean seeing stones on the board, or a go diagram. I do mean having a mental image of some sort.

Yep, I agree. Unfortunately the term "visualization" has become overloaded, and people are using it in this thread and elsewhere to mean both "seeing visual images in your head" and "managing mental representations of local positions that can be queried efficiently and accurately".

This was my process, FWIW. There is a combination of visualization and just suspecting certain things lead to goodness.

John Fairbairn wrote:

Visualisation/visualization means having a mental representation of stone positions. For me, it doesn't mean I can see black and white stones, I can only see gray shadows. Other people's brains work differently.

Is this (working differently) really true?

From this thread it certainly sounds like it is true. My mind produces nothing that I would describe as "gray shadows".

I don't believe I have aphantasia, but I do have trouble forming images in my mind, but I have music pieces on playback all the time. Images are harder, they are fuzzy, and I can only ever get small parts of them in focus, but then I lose the rest of them. Reading on the go board is more like mentally putting down markers - black stone here, white stone here, and it becomes error-prone after a number of moves. That number varies: pattern recognition is a powerful shortcut. The throw-in on the first line example from earlier is such an example, you just know what will happen. Trying to visualize it as I type this, I can see the shape of the four critical white stones, and I know abstractly where black stones would have to be to make the problem work.

Reading a ladder I just follow the staircase up to the point where it threatens to collide with something, and then I reconstruct the markers - white stones would have to be here, then there, then there, so that's atari, so the ladder doesn't work.

bernds wrote:

John Fairbairn wrote: Is this (working differently) really true?

From this thread it certainly sounds like it is true. My mind produces nothing that I would describe as "gray shadows".

I don't believe I have aphantasia, but I do have trouble forming images in my mind, but I have music pieces on playback all the time. Images are harder, they are fuzzy, and I can only ever get small parts of them in focus, but then I lose the rest of them. Reading on the go board is more like mentally putting down markers - black stone here, white stone here, and it becomes error-prone after a number of moves.

Actually the "shadows" I see are very faint and can disappear quite quickly, so I also put mental markers as you do. When reading a ladder, I imagine putting my fingers on intersections where my opponent puts a stone, and my own stones form gray shadows that disappear after a few steps, so I know if some stones are in atari. This is of course error-prone with complicated ladders which bounce and have a capture at an intermediate step.

When there is a capturing race, I can't visualize the dame being filled internally and externally at the same time, so I watch the internal dame and I count each time I suppose an external liberty is filled.