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Tsumego concepts http://lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=18601 |
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Author: | dhu163 [ Sun Feb 13, 2022 4:55 pm ] |
Post subject: | Tsumego concepts |
Among other things, the thread https://lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=18569 has encouraged me to think about concepts on tsumego, one of the most fuzzy and difficult parts of Go to play correctly. The below is a draft of some ideas. It might not make that much sense. There are general proverbs sich as hane, vital point, cut. And I tended to just memorise shapes to know their status and correct move. Probably there isn't much better, but there should still be a list of some tactics from level 0 onwards, even if we know the full list is infinite. Tactical reading tsumego is probably the area in Go most like Chess. I may add diagrams later. Board positions (neighbours and type based) 0. Combinations of the below where one type is a follow up to another type. 1. An entrance point where both sides have solid stones adjacent. In general, a cutting/connection point for both sides. (The attacker can connect to defender's eyespace thereby breaking it, the defender can connect two boundary areas) 2. A cutting move that isolates at least one chain, thereby ensuring that other spaces adjacent to it cannot become an eye. 3. A cutting move that reduces the liberties of all adjacent opponent chains (both current and potential future chains). 4. A ponnuki (or other capturing shapes) isn't connected without the centre point and it takes several more moves to turn it into a solid eye. If the ponnuki must be connected, that costs a liberty. 5. Atari seal and variants are when a group is almost connected to another group (or just the outside) but only via one stone in a bottleneck. The opponent can cut that stone from the group even if the cutting stone dies and use the shortage of liberties to atari block the bottleneck from the other group. Due to 4, the bottleneck remains unconnected, and though it is ko, the opponent capture the bottleneck tends to still be a big move, making it a heavy ko. 6. Diagonal moves tend to help both notches at once. The centre of a farmers hat or cross five tends to be very big even if not all the arms are complete yet since it sets up multiple options. Claiming a bottleneck allows conquer and divide. When attacking, even if you can't save the bottleneck stone, you might still get seki. 7. Instead of playing solidly, adjacent to your support, if you have two close enough supports, it may be more severe to jump in the middle with a miai connection to each support. 8. If your opponent has a weak chain, you have additional influence over its liberties since they eventually threaten to capture the group, giving you more liberties. These can act as supports to allow you to play more deeply. Strategy (goal based) 0. If your opponent is threatening your weak point with a weak group, consider attacking their weak group before defending. Semeai (maxims) 0. Block your opponent from playing where there are more liberties and strengthen your weaker surrounding stones by driving them against your stronger groups until they have nowhere to run (or you have gained enough from the forcing). Attacking with diagonal moves, one space jumps or knight's moves is often the fastest way to seal and the cutting points won't be an immediate problem if your opponent's group is weaker than your own. If you have enough liberties and local support, elephant jumps and larger loose nets may be playable. -- Can the complexity of a go problem be measured in terms of such concepts rather than just the raw variation tree? |
Author: | RobertJasiek [ Sun Feb 13, 2022 11:42 pm ] |
Post subject: | Re: Tsumego concepts |
dhu163 wrote: Can the complexity of a go problem be measured in terms of such concepts rather than just the raw variation tree? As I have explained in [17] for go problems that are capturing races and cannot be solved only by the theory of numbers and types of liberties, the frequencies of problems are as follows: 66% Tactical reading (its method, submethods and decision-making) 17% Tactical reading + Liberties 7% Tactical reading + Techniques 4% Tactical reading + Liberties + Techniques 5% Tactical reading + Counting points In non-semeai problems, the Liberties (theory of numbers and types of liberties) hardly occur but otherwise I expect similar relative percentages. Most of what you discuss belongs to Techniques and is most of what traditional teaching disucsses while the omnipresent Tactical reading is often hopelessly under-represented compared to the actually NECESSARY and MANDATORY numbers of tactical variations and their decision-making. Tactical reading has two major types: a) Yes / No problems (such as "unconditionally alive in sente with maximum points difference"), b) different possible outcomes (including sente, sacrifices, more local points versus more influence or less remaining aji, seki, ordinary ko capture-first Black, 1-step approach ko, bent-4 etc.), which must be compared and of which several might be correct depending on the global context. Then Tactical reading of type (a) has two major types of decision-making: 1) it is sufficient to find at least one correct answer, 2) it is mandatory to refute all options as failures. Depending on which variation subtree is explored, iterative decision-making can result in different numbers of variations whose reading is mandatory because both types of decision-making are involved and some subtrees allow other pruning of optional variations. Nevertheless, for all subtrees one can conclude the minimum number of variations whose reading is mandatory. In type (2) problems, these numbers are much larger than traditional teaching conveys, also because lazy traditional teaching shows much larger percentages of (a) and (1) problems than occur in real games. |
Author: | dust [ Mon Feb 14, 2022 4:06 am ] |
Post subject: | Re: Tsumego concepts |
dhu163 wrote: Strategy (goal based) 0. If your opponent is threatening your weak point with a weak group, consider attacking their weak group before defending. I'm not sure if these fit in within your list, or if they are too broad because they are about tsumego in a game context, but additional tsumego strategy concepts in addition to "kikashi before living" might be: Defending: - is it bigger to save the group or play elsewhere? Can I use a threat to save this group in another way ? - Is it dead cleanly if I tenuki? Is there a ko? What are the ko options? - What is the best way to defend? Is it better to play at a vital point, or defend by making an option to connect to another group, or cut a surrounding group, or another move that is better for later reducing my opponent's territory? Attacking: - Is this the right time to kill? Is it the biggest move? - How big a commitment is killing this group? Is there an existing or potential ko where this may be a large source of ko threats for my opponent? - Is it a clean kill, or ko (or seki) ? What are the ko options? - Are there moves that my opponent can make later to threaten to revive the group that may be problematic (e.g. moves with a double threat that can't be answered simultaneously)? If so, how quickly can I remove the group in an emergency (e.g. possible neighbouring semeai) |
Author: | John Fairbairn [ Mon Feb 14, 2022 5:43 am ] |
Post subject: | Re: Tsumego concepts |
Quote: Can the complexity of a go problem be measured in terms of such concepts rather than just the raw variation tree? That seems to me like the approach of a numbers guy. Experience tells me that people on one side of a dividing line are very rarely willing to contemplate looking at things from the point of view of the other side. But let me risk that, and give a words guy view of it. You probably read that paragraph and understood it almost instantly. We all do that all the time, on both sides of the divide. But if I ask you now to close your eyes and repeat the words back to me, I'd expect almost everyone to fail miserably. I would, and I wrote it. But it goes further. Tell me whether the word 'try' appeared in it. I'd expect you to be rather unsure (you might remember 'risk', or was it 'try'? Or did try come somewhere else? But did you understand it? Yes. Well, more or less. I'm certain you got the gist of it, but you may have put more weight on a portion of it than I intended, and you almost certainly made associations that I wouldn't hope for (e.g. is this guy a plonker on his hobby horse again?). And despite that, I don't think we would normally say we have mis-communicated with each other. Now join me in the assumption that a tsumego problem can be likened to a paragraph of text. After reading it, you will not have a single point of view. You will have the gist of it with lots of associations (it's probably dead, but there's a ko if I want it, and it's not all that big so I might not play it in a real game - in fact it's so weird I might never see it in a real game; but can I grab it anyway in sente?) I suggest that something like that is the likely (and best) form of answer in real life. But what about the apparent perfection reading it out move by move? Well, I think everyone accepts that in most of the really interesting cases we can't do that. The human brain doesn't work that way. Even bots have their limits on that way of working. Yet, on behalf of the human brain, take the word 'set'. We meet that with very high frequency in all sorts of sentences, and in virtually every case we read and understand it instantly. But "easily?" Jellies set, dogs set, I set the table, you set an exam, I dance in a set, I set to my partner, she's one of the smart set, the doc sets the bone, the carpenter adjusts the set of a saw, a rock star performs his set, Nadal wins the final set, the custard is set off, we set off on our journey, we are all set, they are setting themselves up for a set-to, does a badger live in a set or a sett, set the alarm at a set time every day at sun set. And so on and so forth. This is a level of complexity far, far, far, far greater than the level of complexity of a typical tsumego problem, where you get typically a choice of just one to three or four moves at each branch. Yet we humans cope instantly with a sentence with 'set' in it (and bear in mind that almost every other word sentence will also have a similar range of complexity). By 'cope' I don't just mean understand, for we instantly also dredge up a huge range of useful associations. So, it seems to me that we should be looking for ways to simulate that process in 'reading' tsumego. It can be done. I have witnessed numerous occasions where go players (both pro and amateur) are presented with a problem they have not seen before, but they solve it instantly. They are clearly not solving it by brute force. They are seeing 'simple' components like 'set'. By the same token, there have been cases where even a pro is stumped by a short problem simply because he's never seen anything like it before. I'd likewise expect most readers to be puzzled if I say 'latitudinarian.' The keys to profound learning of tsumego techniques seem to be like native-language learning. Foreign-language learning is a very different and inferior beast, but most adults actually follow that route in go. The main characteristics of NLL are, initially, massive repetition and not worrying about mistakes. We further teach children a small sub-set of the basic language and provide lots of extraneous clues such as hand gestures. Has this been done for go? I think not. Adults don't like repetitive work, so don't do it or buy books that contain it. They hate making mistakes, and many hate even more having their mistakes pointed out. Many hate having tsumegos with hints. The books that are provided are, it is true, a sub-set of tsumego, but totally the wrong sort - under the stones, flower six and double kos. So, making the probably wild assumption that a decent number of adults can be persuade to try the NLL approach, the first task in tsumego seems to be to establish what the basic go language is. My contention is that that cannot be done properly by adults making lists based on their own adult experience. I'd argue that the only way to do it is to get the probabilities for each type of tsumego technique from real games. This has been done to an extent in traditional teaching (so, for example, we learn about nakade moves and L shapes). But there are two problems with traditional teaching. One is that it stops after a very few basic techniques, then jumps straight to under-the-stones and the like. The other is that there is next to nothing that allows us to practise basic techniques over and over again. There are some honourable exceptions. Magazines like Go World often have a few pages of easy problems of the same type, and the Meijin Inseki wrote a whole book of just this type (most of it sadly lost). But, for the most part, go teaching is treated like adult food: beef today, chicken tomorrow, fish on Friday, etc. But in go we adults are really still toddlers - we need to be suckled on milk, milk, milk. If we can be taught this way, we don't just absorb the techniques themselves but also the context and probabilities of their occurrence. Once that is achieved, we can 'read' problems instantly and reliably (enough), just as we read threads like this. Being clever humans, we can then even become adept enough to read the go equivalent of sentences like "Pas de l'yeux Rhône que nous." ADDENDUM A grandson of mine is learning to read using phonics. I've been quite impressed with the results, and so looked the topic up. Here is one brief description. Quote: How is phonics taught? Words are made up of just 44 sounds in English. You may have heard your child or their teacher use particular words that form the core of understanding phonics. Here's a quick explanation of some of the key concepts. Phoneme - the smallest unit of sound as it is spoken. Grapheme - a written symbol that represents a sound (phoneme) that's either one letter or a sequence of letters Digraph - two letters that work together to make the same sound (ch, sh, ph) Trigraph - three letters that work together to make the same sound (igh, ore, ear) Split digraph (sometimes called 'magic e') - two letters that work together to make the same sound, separated by another letter in the same word. This enables children to understand the difference in vowel sounds between, for example, grip/gripe, rag/rage, tap/tape. Rather than memorising words individually, children are taught a code which helps them to work out how to read an estimated 95% of the English language. What I take away from this is that: (1) for even the task of reading English, a task vastly more complex than for tsume go, the number of basic overarching concepts can be very small; (2) the results apply to 95% of what we meet in real life. |
Author: | RobertJasiek [ Mon Feb 14, 2022 9:53 am ] |
Post subject: | Re: Tsumego concepts |
John Fairbairn wrote: what about the apparent perfection reading it out move by move? Well, I think everyone accepts that in most of the really interesting cases we can't do that. You convey it as if each move must be read but, usually, this is not so because the theory of tactical theory permits consideration of only (the) relevant moves. Quote: I have witnessed numerous occasions where go players (both pro and amateur) are presented with a problem they have not seen before, but they solve it instantly. You convey it as if "solving a problem" were "stating the correct answer". Such is NOT the solution, but is only part of the solution. A solution of a problem includes all necessary decision-making. (Decision-making can be explicit or sometimes implicit, such as in techniques.) Some problems can be solved immediately by stating the correct answer and all necessary decision-making. E.g., this is so for most players if a problem shows a nakade. Very many real game problems cannot be solved immediately. I have seen many players thinking they would have solved a problem immediately but when asked showed their unawareness of the solution. Quote: They are clearly not solving it by brute force. Who cares? Brute force is improper in almost all cases. It is proper to apply the theory of tactical reading etc. Quote: there have been cases where even a pro is stumped by a short problem simply because he's never seen anything like it before. No. Such a pro does not fail only because of not having seen anything similar before but because the pro has also not applied tactical reading to solve it. Quote: The keys to profound learning of tsumego techniques Good, but, again, techniques are relevant in only a small fraction of all practically occurring tsumego problems. The key to profound learning tsumego problem solving is first tactical reading, second tactical reading, third tactical reading, fourth other means including counting and techniques. Quote: I'd argue that the only way to do it is to get the probabilities for each type of tsumego technique from real games. First, study the 86 ~ 89% of tsumegos without applicable techniques. Second study the 11 ~ 14% of tsumego with applicable techniques (and there the more frequent ones before the less frequent ones, if you prefer). Quote: This has been done to an extent in traditional teaching (so, for example, we learn about nakade moves and L shapes). The point of nakade is not so much the technique of playing on the vital intersection but to create a known position with known outcome as a submethod of tactical reading. Likewise, the point of L shapes is not their shapes but to create a known position. In reading, techniques (if they occur at all) are more relevant before reaching known positions. Quote: milk, milk, milk. Ok:) Quote: Once that is achieved, we can 'read' problems instantly and reliably (enough) No, but then we can only read those problems with techniques well. Milk, milk, milk is, foremost, needed for practising tactical reading. |
Author: | dhu163 [ Mon Feb 14, 2022 12:46 pm ] | |||
Post subject: | Re: Tsumego concepts | |||
Some diagrams to organise and present my thoughts. General opening concepts: Other than "play in corners", "develop your areas", "attack your opponent's weak groups", "play moves that work well with multiple stones", let's try to list some beginner concepts that are slightly more advanced. I focus on the opening, drawing inspiration from PETC games. Basically these are all variations of "don't play near thickness".
Tesuji meaning. Classification start 101weiqi thoughts
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Author: | RobertJasiek [ Mon Feb 14, 2022 11:04 pm ] |
Post subject: | Re: Tsumego concepts |
dhu163, the subject is Tsumego concepts but now you (and others) also talk about strategic concepts. Fine, no problem. I just wonder what you are aiming at. Concepts of go theory in general or do you have a more specific goal focusing around tsumego, where all strategic / global considerations are somehow related to local tsumego? |
Author: | dhu163 [ Tue Feb 15, 2022 4:27 am ] |
Post subject: | Re: Tsumego concepts |
"words guy": When I think about encoding, words are an alphabet, just as numbers are too. No real clue. I don't think I have the energy to push it much further. Just a collection of ideas. edit: 20220514. Associations. |
Author: | dfan [ Tue Feb 15, 2022 6:19 am ] |
Post subject: | Re: Tsumego concepts |
dhu163 wrote: Among other things, the thread https://lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=18569 has encouraged me to think about concepts on tsumego, one of the most fuzzy and difficult parts of Go to play correctly. [...] Can the complexity of a go problem be measured in terms of such concepts rather than just the raw variation tree? I have had the same sort of thoughts over the years. It feels weird that so much of my life-and death-thinking, except for capturing races, mostly comes down to "does this move work?". If you have access to the Go Books platform, you might be interested in the Tsume-Go Strategy books by Thomas Redecker (Cassandra here on L19), which attempt to break down tsumego problems in this sort of scientific way to a degree that I have not seen elsewhere. |
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