Good, but I'm not saying that everything was better in the past. I'm saying that past generations were looking more for mastery of a craft than development of the self. I may be wrong on this but I don't think your article is a proof.

By first generalizing to me saying the past was objectively better and then proving it wasn't because most things are objectively better today, I think you have provided a pretty good strawman yourself

BTW: on this side track, I think music has degraded but games and television series are a lot better today. Poverty is definitely a smaller problem now than it used to be and air pollution in cities is better than in 19th century. However, traffic noise is a bigger problem than ever before. I am not an incurable nostalgic but neither a relentless positivist or relativist for that matter.

No, it was a response to you saying that I claim people want to be original at the expense of winning. I didn't say that at all. So what are we doing here? Repeating that neither of us are saying something that is a response to what the other said?

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

In go, I don't think people want to have a style for the sake of having a personal way of playing. They want a style that helps them win more games (at least in the short term). Their reasoning can be like: I am bad at handling situation X but good at handling situation Y, so my style should be to avoid X and drive the game towards Y.

My thinking has been the opposite. But I still have a style.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Humans make models of reality to try to understand things. Go proverbs are one such example: we try to make a model of reality that we can easily remember, which can guide us when playing. Such models simplify the complexity of reality, and give us heuristics that can simplify the decision making process.

In some ways, conceptualizing a particular "style" is a type of model. It gives something to fall back on when we can't think of a good option. Or it gives us ideas that we might not otherwise come up with.

Playing "the best move" is the obvious objective. Maybe thinking about a certain type of style can at least bring to mind ideas we might not otherwise think of.

I don't personally do this consciously, but it seems feasible to me that some people could. Is it a good idea? Maybe to get new ideas. Relying only upon such a model could be dubious.

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be immersed

Related links:
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FactfulnessSapiens

I missed all the fun the other day when this discussion heated up again.

My conclusion is that anyone, really, can have a style and in two different ways:

1) No matter what, you're subconsciously going to have a bias to certain ways of dealing with situations when there is no clear-cut solution (i.e., correct move).

2) There is such a thing as "playing to one's strengths". You can consciously base a style on what you perceive to be your better attributes. If you do better with 5-4 points as your opening moves, then that's practically a good choice, even if AIs don't recommend them. If you find it easier to win by emphasising territory, then that's a clear signal to choose ways of play that do that. If you're good at fighting, then taking risks might be the order of the day. And there is also the further option of playing not necessarily to one's strengths, but going with one's tastes.

Now, if you move the goalposts and say that style is an original way of playing or a fully developed "philosophy" of play, then I would have to concede that that is best left to the pros. Who knows, maybe an amateur could make up their own and even make it work, but I'd be sceptical.

My own style of play is not especially original. I just tend to go for influence more determinedly than most people around my strength, and it seems to work well for me at my level. I might, for example, play a capping move against a two-space base formation where most other amateur shodans would play a checking move, but that's just borrowing ideas from above and using them for myself. I try also to play "correctly" where it is possible to be correct, but that's rather hard to do with any consistency.

I was able to recognise Dieter's play fairly accurately. That's no more a bad reflection on Dieter's strength, in my opinion, than being able to discern between a Dosaku game and a Takemiya game is a negative reflection on their play. I'm all for AI and learning from it, but it alarms me if people are going to become all dogmatic about go in the wake of it. If, one day, go is actually solved, perhaps it will turn out that there are many paths up the mountain, and then you can choose the one that fits your style. (Or is it the case that zero-sum games can only ever have one solution, mathematically?)

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I rather suspect that to be the case. If, indeed, optimal play by both sides leads to Black being 7 pts. ahead on the board, then we already know of many ways of getting there. OC, nearly all of those ways contain mistakes by both players, but eliminating those mistakes will very likely lead to several lines of correct play.



Zero sum games of the type that go is have one solution in the sense of having one score that each player can guarantee. But each player may have many strategies that do so.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

I'm not trying to warm up a meal that's gone cold. I have already concluded that the difference in views on this thread is mainly a generational thing, but I was amused last night by a blast from the past. The old Lonnie Donnegan song below came on the car stereo.

She's putting on the agony
Putting on the style
That's what all the young folks
Are doing all the while
And as I look around me
I sometimes have to smile
Seeing all the young folks
Putting on the style