Life In 19x19

Time for you to brew up a coffee. By the time you read the introduction, I'm hoping the caffeine will kick in and you can answer my question.

Many years ago there was a delicious news story in England about a Japanese man in Wales. To appreciate it, you perhaps need to know that there is a belief in England that, if you, as an Englishman, go into a pub in Wales where, as usual, they are speaking in English, as soon as they see you they switch to speaking in Welsh. I have no personal experience of this canard, but a close Welsh-speaking friend of mine says not many Welshmen in the pub would be able to speak Welsh anyway.

The story is that a Japanese professor walked into a pub in Wales one day, and they were all speaking Welsh. He then astonished them by addressing them in Welsh. But the real astonishment came when, as conversation ensued, they discovered he was not a professor of linguistics, as might reasonably be supposed, but a professor of knitting.

The apparent explanation of why such a thing existed was that the Japanese were producing knitting machines. Perhaps the professor was scouting out Wales to base a factory there. At any rate, Japanese factory investment in Wales later became very important to the principality, and in my days as an economics correspondent I sometimes had to cover stories about this. By all accounts it went pretty much to the satisfaction of both sides and so a warm feeling between Japan and Wales developed.

That sensitised me, and so I took a keen interest when I recently discovered that there is an organisation in Wales called Soroban Cymru (abacus board Wales). Actually, they appear to be more interested in a special use of the Japanese abacus (soroban) called anzan. I'm not well up on it, but I gather it's become a bit of a craze in Japan, with a tv show and a computer game (Flash Anzan). Although the abacus is rarely used in shops nowadays in Japan, many people still study it as means of brain training, and they even have national competitions and dan grades just like go.

Anzan is a special form of the skill because it is all done in the head, by visualising an abacus. People listen to numbers being dictated and do enormous calculations with them faster than using computers and calculators, simply because they've finished before a machine user has even entered the numbers. This echoes a well known story when the American occupation force settled into Japan just after World War II and tried to get Japanese business to use electric adding machines (i.e. buy them from American companies) instead of abacuses. The Japanese resisted, and showed why by easily outpacing the machine in competitions.

The method of playing anzan - someone dictates numbers while a group responds - also echoes the way 100 Poets and Iroha card games, or the shell-matching game, are played, usually at new year. I mention that just to show that anzan is not quite as weird as you may think at first.

Now, reading a bit about anzan, I learned that they have discovered that expert practitioners use a completely different part of the brain - a visuospatial one - for anzan than the area (the lingusitic processing one) used for ordinary arithmetic.

It seems that this parallels other stuff I've read about experts in as diverse a range of skills as tennis, music and chess. I gather that these experts stimulate and develop a part of the brain that has nothing to with understanding what they are doing. Indeed, understanding can interfere strongly with what they are trying to achieve. Apparently this is the cause of choking in sport. Their goal is rather to develop automaticity and they do this by constant repetition of tasks imposed on them by a coach. Obviously they glean a vague idea of what they are doing and why (e.g. they understand what top spin looks like, or that control of the centre is usually good), but only in a superficial way. If greater understanding is required, for example to correct a fault, that's the coach's job, and he comes up with another set of repetitions. It seems to be well established that ten thousand hours is required for mastery by this method, in any discipline. But what struck me was that experts in anzan - a recent fad - were very unlikely to have spent that amount of time. It's not even a profession.

And that brings me to my question, with the hope that the caffeine is working now. Whilst this is all very well for real experts, I think most of us would be satisfied with partial expertise, say 5-dan amateur, or 1-dan, or whatever, so: what is the best way for us to achieve that? Should we study and think, or should we just work out?

Before reading up about anzan, I was inclined to think that for us halfway housers study and thought were probably best. They would never make us real experts. We'd accept that x-dan amateur would be the upper limit anyone could achieve that way (and even then it would probably have included some repetition). But it looks like a less painful and more enjoyable process - buy a few books, maybe discuss them with friends or on L19, and if we get stuck, buy another book. The holy grail is always round the corner, in our world.

Now I'm wondering about the alternative way. If 10,000 hours would get me to 9-dan, and maybe 5,000 hours, to 1-dan pro, could I get to amateur x-dan with, say, 3,000 hours of playing over games and doing tsumego?

The answer's almost certainly yes, because the top experts in sport have had to go through these various stages themselves, and they are clearly already pretty good when they've done only a few thousand hours. But the big difference seems to be that they are already highly focused at that stage and are doing nothing but repetitions. They don't let trying to understand get in the way.

We less devoted souls, however, seem very prone to mixing up the methods. We might do a bit of repetition but then read a book for a change of pace. But is that actually harmful? Pure repetition can work. Pure study can work, although do a much more limited degree. But if we mix them, are we ending up with no, or reduced, benefits from either method?

This may be a two-coffee case, Watson, but I'd honestly prefer it if a more considered opinion was given than a no-coffee one. It's too late for me to benefit from a change of method myself (I'm a mixer, but with very little repetition), and I know a definitive answer is unlikely in the current state of knowledge, but I'd still like to know the likely answer.

I'm a 5 dan at Soroban and a 3 dan at Anzan, I took the courses when I was a kid and found that it gave me a huge boost over my peers at arithmetic.

And yes, it easily outstrips a calculator at basic operations until you get to multiplication by 3-4 digits. For sequences of adding and subtracting, a calculator is quite slower until you get to 7-8+ digits.

I guess it helped with the development of my visuospatial reasoning that's also used for Go.

Isn't there a study that said that professionals use parts of the brain similar to getting to know a person when they are considering an endgame position?

I do think there's a cumulative benefit to working on the same kind of problem for a while: it sticks deeper into your brain somehow. For example I think 2 hours of tsumego is probably more than twice as helpful as 1 hour. So maybe switching study types too much slows us down?

I managed to find instructions for addition and subtraction on the soroban: http://www.scribd.com/doc/3832726/Sorob ... tical-Tool

Can anyone point me at instructions for multiplication/division? It was surprisingly difficult to find anything...

And to attempt to contribute to the topic at hand: I and others often tell beginners to quickly play 100 or more 9x9 games against IgoWin, that their brain will pick up a few basic patterns faster than I could teach it to them...

This article is always apropos in such discussions:

To become a master of go is not easy, but became an amateur 5d or 6d it's not hard

(Article summary: do tsumego every waking moment for 3 years)

I think that pure repetition is maybe the most efficient way. But it takes a lot of work to do pure repetition for long periods of time every day. It is not easy.

Isn't TMark a test case in go, at least? When he is entering all those thousands of game records into the data base I assume he isn't taking much time to think why a move was played.

I can only speak for myself but the one thing, which always made me stronger, was solving tons of Tsumego/Tesuji-problems. I went from 6-7k to 4k last year within one month by solving 30 to 50 Tsumego/Tesujis a day and now I steadily work towards 2k by doing the same (though a lesser amount per day).
The same goes for playing a lot. I always neglected playing because it is - compared to solving Tsumegos - very time-consuming (at least if you prefer to play by KGS slow settings). Now, I tend to play a lot of free 15 minutes games and through experiencing a lot of situations, I notice how I'm becoming more stable even if my opponent plays center-orientated (which I hate the most). Through try-and-error and reviews by stronger players (coaching? ; ) ) I now start to know how to work with this style; I get a feeling which Aji I can use in various situations after e.g. Josekis.

I can't claim I now "understand" more, I'd prefer to call it: I "see" more. (Fact is, a local Dan-player scolds me very often saying I gave away too much while following some plan, where I actually was very happy that I achieved what I had planed - he just sees more than I do)
As Go evolves a lot through shapes, many Tsumego/Tesuji-problems cover those. You just start to know, that there is something because you have solved a lot of problems with similiar shapes. I don't know the theory behind it or why the move really works, my brain just remembered the shape/pattern.

That reminds me of another local Dan-player. He says, what made him a stronger player was memorising some hundreds (thousands) often reoccurring L&D-situations (and of course solving a lot more on the way).
Books about strategy and such weren't all that available at his prime.

Finally, since I'm a firm believer that hard-work outclasses talent and that you can achieve everything giving firstly the motivation and secondly the time, I think repetition is the only way to master something.
At least that's how my brain works ^^

If 10,000 hours would get me to 9-dan, and maybe 5,000 hours, to 1-dan pro, could I get to amateur x-dan with, say, 3,000 hours of playing over games and doing tsumego?

The answer's almost certainly yes, because the top experts in sport have had to go through these various stages themselves, and they are clearly already pretty good when they've done only a few thousand hours. But the big difference seems to be that they are already highly focused at that stage and are doing nothing but repetitions. They don't let trying to understand get in the way.

We less devoted souls, however, seem very prone to mixing up the methods. We might do a bit of repetition but then read a book for a change of pace. But is that actually harmful? Pure repetition can work. Pure study can work, although do a much more limited degree. But if we mix them, are we ending up with no, or reduced, benefits from either method?

It is too late to drink coffee now for me, but after a beer I would say:

Repetition is the key, but you should make sure that you exercise your muscles in the process, that is doing tsumego by reading not by guessing and also playing with reading not by wishful thinking. Otherwise even repetition leads you nowhere. When talking about repetition: Even a set of 200 or 1000 tsumego is easily learnt by heart if you repeat them (and have some sort of memory), that may be useful in its own right, but wasn't the reading exercise it is supposed to be.

Regarding book knowledge I think most amateur players (myself included) know too much already, while lacking the fundamentals. But I would not blame the books but the attitude, if you read fancy opening theories or chatty stuff about famous professional to escape the exercising (or write longish articles in L19 or SL to the same end), you will end up without sufficient reading muscles to put that knowledge to test. But unfortunately you need to learn quite a lot to see how bad and lacking your basic skills really are.

daniel_the_smith wrote:Can anyone point me at instructions for multiplication/division? It was surprisingly difficult to find anything...

This page is nice: http://webhome.idirect.com/~totton/abacus/
It has basic instructions for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, and also advanced techniques like certain shortcuts, square roots and so on...

I wrote up what I remembered about mental math, thinking that I had some point to make about training. Alas, I seem to have misplaced the point, but I still have all this text. Maybe the rest of you can sort out whether it supports, undermines, or is irrelevant to John's suggestions:

Back in college, I read a paper about Alexander Aitken, who was an exceptional human calculator. I recall thinking that the paper ("An Exceptional Talent for Calculative Thinking") was very interesting, though you will need a JSTOR subscription to access it. Here is a capsule version by the author of that piece: http://www.answers.com/topic/calculating-geniuses.

Aitken, like most Western calculators, learned a great many shortcuts and mathematical tidbits to develop his ability. The only one I can remember off the top of my head is that for adding or multiplying several digit numbers, you work from the left not the right. Working from right to left and carrying, as you do with paper, overtaxes working memory.

Most of these tricks are self-taught, and are often individually quite simple. Added together, they allow him to report 4/47 to 26 places in a matter of seconds. Aitken seemed to be distinguished in that he knew more of them than most, had practiced until both those tricks and individual calculations were lightning fast, and had an abnormally good memory even before studying calculation. He also was more willing or able to talk about how he did the calculations--eventually parts of the process do become automatic. He would say "In a flash I can get that 23 into 4,027 is 175 with remainder 2." Many calculators began learning as young children, and lacked insight into how they did the trick. Others were showmen who performed in carnivals, and were naturally quite secretive.

John Fairbairn wrote:...
Now, reading a bit about anzan, I learned that they have discovered that expert practitioners use a completely different part of the brain - a visuospatial one - for anzan than the area (the lingusitic processing one) used for ordinary arithmetic.

It seems that this parallels other stuff I've read about experts in as diverse a range of skills as tennis, music and chess. I gather that these experts stimulate and develop a part of the brain that has nothing to with understanding what they are doing. Indeed, understanding can interfere strongly with what they are trying to achieve. Apparently this is the cause of choking in sport. Their goal is rather to develop automaticity and they do this by constant repetition of tasks imposed on them by a coach. Obviously they glean a vague idea of what they are doing and why (e.g. they understand what top spin looks like, or that control of the centre is usually good), but only in a superficial way. If greater understanding is required, for example to correct a fault, that's the coach's job, and he comes up with another set of repetitions. It seems to be well established that ten thousand hours is required for mastery by this method, in any discipline. But what struck me was that experts in anzan - a recent fad - were very unlikely to have spent that amount of time. It's not even a profession.

And that brings me to my question, with the hope that the caffeine is working now. Whilst this is all very well for real experts, I think most of us would be satisfied with partial expertise, say 5-dan amateur, or 1-dan, or whatever, so: what is the best way for us to achieve that? Should we study and think, or should we just work out?

Before reading up about anzan, I was inclined to think that for us halfway housers study and thought were probably best. They would never make us real experts. We'd accept that x-dan amateur would be the upper limit anyone could achieve that way (and even then it would probably have included some repetition). But it looks like a less painful and more enjoyable process - buy a few books, maybe discuss them with friends or on L19, and if we get stuck, buy another book. The holy grail is always round the corner, in our world.

Now I'm wondering about the alternative way. If 10,000 hours would get me to 9-dan, and maybe 5,000 hours, to 1-dan pro, could I get to amateur x-dan with, say, 3,000 hours of playing over games and doing tsumego?

The answer's almost certainly yes, because the top experts in sport have had to go through these various stages themselves, and they are clearly already pretty good when they've done only a few thousand hours. But the big difference seems to be that they are already highly focused at that stage and are doing nothing but repetitions. They don't let trying to understand get in the way.

We less devoted souls, however, seem very prone to mixing up the methods. We might do a bit of repetition but then read a book for a change of pace. But is that actually harmful? Pure repetition can work. Pure study can work, although do a much more limited degree. But if we mix them, are we ending up with no, or reduced, benefits from either method?

After reading John's post, like a few others I looked at some instructions on the website Flovermind menitioned on how to use a soroban ("Japanese abacus," for those of you who are wondering, and "Japanese arithmetic board" for those who find "abacus" a bit uncommon), and by the time I woke up the next morning, I was able to add and subtract 3 digit numbers in my head.

The way a soroban works is purely mechanical. Once you learn the "trick" of using complementary numbers, you're just pushing beads up or down. The way anzan works, is that you visualize the positions of the beads on an imaginary soroban.

I have often mentioned my difficulties regarding the visualization of go stones, and I must say that while the visualization of a soroban has some similarities, it is also significantly simpler. For each rod, there are 10 possible positions which correlate to the very familiar numbers 0-9. The division of the rod into two sections further simplifies the visualization, as there are never more than 4 beads in a section to keep track of - and I have read somewhere that the mind is easily capable of instantly recognizing a quantity of less than 5 objects.

When doing arithmetic with a soroban, one manipulates at the most two rods at a time, so the greatest difficulty in visualizing the result is keeping track of previous operations. You might say that this is the same with go, that what we do when we visualize a sequence is that we keep track of previously placed stones. A go stone however, carries far more information with it than a soroban bead, and it is much easier to keep track of whether the information signifies a number between 0 and 9 or offers a mix of concrete information - the liberty counts of various and not consistently affected groups, as well as abstract information regarding the relative strengths and weaknesses of the stones involved.

The skill set for using a soroban is largely mechanical proficiency, and as such, repetition is a highly appropriate training method. The more you practice, the faster you become, and getting faster is practically the only goal, because there is nothing more accurate than a correct answer.

Aside from streamlining hand movements when using an actual soroban (as opposed to doing the motions mentally), there is nothing comparable to the intricacies of a golf swing or a tennis serve. Although there have apparently been developments over the last 100 years regarding techniques of division for example, I strongly doubt that the possibility of increasing one's anzan skill with "study" as opposed to repetitive practice exists.

In short, we are comparing apples to oranges.

This is not to say that the comparison is impossible, just that it seems to throw little light on how best to improve at go. The problem is that with anzan, it is obvious that repetition hones a narrowly defined skill, whereas with go, the skillset is huge. I recently purchased volume 2 of Fujisawa Shukos Dictionary of Basic Tesuji, and the table of contents shows eleven distinct aspects alone for defending stones, and the book concludes with examples of brilliant tesujis from classic games. There is nothing more brilliant about using a soroban than about operating a calculator.

While the closest comparison to repetitive anzan practice would be tsumego, it must be noted, that when we practice anzan we are actually performing the required task, and when we do tsumego, we are practicing but an element of the game. Furthermore, tsumego is never the sole method of study. One must also invariably learn by playing games.

While I also doubt that my preferred study method (mish-mash) is the most effective, I also doubt that x hours of tsumego would necessarily bring about x ranks of improvement. The wonderful thing about the soroban is that with practice, it becomes a simple and as natural as walking. While some professionals speak of "natural" moves, they never play them unquestioningly. Go is never like walking; it is never mechanical. It is always like thinking - although also like sensing. While repetition allows an athlete, performer or soldier to perform a particular task perfectly, unthinkingly and automatically, this option does not exist in go because every move is a decision. Deciding where to place a stone is radically different than making a decision in the middle of a golf swing.

It is probably also the case however, that good go (or good chess for that matter) requires excellent right brain activity, and that repetition might free up enough of the left brain's resources to allow one's creative side to be effective, but, but, but... I like to read go books!

One thing that I'm noticing when practicing anzan, is that despite making the finger movements, the mental image of the beads evaporates fairly quickly, and try to compensate by verbalizing the number that each rod currently represents. I suppose that anyone highly skilled at anzan doesn't do this. Perhaps there's more to the visualization similarity than I thought, but in any case, these numerical placeholders also get drowned out fairly quickly due to the mental noise of further numbers.

What interests me about all this at the moment, is that I'm also noticing a descriptive commentary in my brain that bears some similarity to what I say to myself when I'm trying to read in go. When adding 17+ 16 for example, I make the 17 while moving my hand and saying "Tock. Tock." to myself. Then when adding the 14 I say: "Tock," mentally adding one bead to the tens column,(at this stage, I don't need to say "2,"), then, recognizing that a ten needs to be carried, "tock, 3" and then "the complement of 6 is 4, take away the 5 (from the ones column) and add a 1, 33."

Particularly, as in this example, I have trouble when I need to do something with the complement of 5, and surely repetitive practice will make me better, but for a moment, I'd like to compare this to my go inner dialogue.

For quite some time, I've been saying something like: "I go here, he goes here, I go here...etc." Recently, somewhat inspired by this thread about reading shortage of liberties and this one about envisioning a go game as a conversation, I've been trying to impart my inner dialogue with a bit more useful information, and have been saying for example: "I go here, black has 4 liberties, white has 2, he goes here, we both have 3 liberties, etc."

With both go and anzan, I find myself struggling to support my visual memory by verbalizing the actions of the stones and beads. Does everybody do this?

Good thread; I feel it's encouraging me to open up in some fundamental way. From nibbling tsumego to swallowing them wholesale and becoming what I eat. I'm trying to think now what has prevented me from 'becoming' tsumego, maybe a fear of losing my identity. It might sound silly but for me it's an anxiety-point and now I feel inclined to test it. Maybe if I'm not afraid of it then something productive will happen.

hyperpape wrote:Back in college, I read a paper about Alexander Aitken, who was an exceptional human calculator. I recall thinking that the paper ("An Exceptional Talent for Calculative Thinking") was very interesting, though you will need a JSTOR subscription to access it. Here is a capsule version by the author of that piece: http://www.answers.com/topic/calculating-geniuses.

Aitken, like most Western calculators, learned a great many shortcuts and mathematical tidbits to develop his ability. The only one I can remember off the top of my head is that for adding or multiplying several digit numbers, you work from the left not the right. Working from right to left and carrying, as you do with paper, overtaxes working memory.

It's amazing for me to find him mentioned here, I'm a descendant of Aitken on my father's mother's side. I don't have any of his calculation talent or knack for simplifying numbers. I tend to go in the exact opposite direction.

This topic is one that I have touched on before. See http://senseis.xmp.net/?BillSpight%2Fimprovement , in particular the go savant section.

One thing that I have not noticed in the comments so far is the question of the differences between adults and children. Their brains are different.