I have long believed and still do, that the key ability for a go player to possess is the ability to visualize. By visualize, I mean the ability to see in one's mind's eye the relevant properties of postulated stones - which stones are they touching, are they part of a string, how many liberties do they have, does the group have any cutting points, etc. Visualization underlies practically all of the essential tasks that one must perform to be good at go. First and foremost among these tasks is reading but also judging the outcome of postulated sequences. Whether you are choosing a joseki (and remembering it) or placing a stone in the opening, middle game or end game, it is your ability to visualize the allows you to determine your best choice of action. Furthermore, strong players reduce the time and energy spent reading by recognizing identical or comparable situations of which they know and can recall the outcome. They also see the opportunity for remembered tesujis when they arrive. Why can they do this? Because of their ability to visualize.

Without the ability to visualize, one will not be able to play go effectively.

I imagine that for some of you this is a non-issue, and that this ability is one you take for granted or perhaps appreciate, but cannot imaging not being able to do at all. For others however, not being able to accurately visualize is painful handicap.

I've long lamented my ability to oversee cutting points or mis-calculate eyespace even when the stones are not postulated, but actually on the board. Why is this so? For some time I attributed this weakness to my age (I started go in my mid- 40's), and I still think that that's partly right. Seeing shapes evolve from round stones placed on intersections is something that my mind balks at and might not had I been exposed to it earlier. I still think go would be significantly easier for me to visualize if the stones were placed on the squares and not the intersections.In any case, I don't have much choice about my age, but I do think that it might be possible to get better at visualizing.

Basically, there is a standard method for developing one's reading, and that is tsumego. The drawback is, if you are not good at visualizing, you won't be good at tsumego. You'll be constantly misinterpreting the effects of postulated stones if you can't see them for example as part of a string that can be cut off. Sure, one gets better by doing more tsumego, but to me, just doing tsumego seems to bypass the underlying issue - without the bones of visualization, the muscle of reading is bound to remain ineffective.

While I was on vacation, I came to the realization that if I am going to move past my current barrier, I will have to do something different than what I have been doing so far, and I came up with an idea. Instead of practicing reading, I will practice visualizing the problems. The method I thought up is this:

I look at a problem, preferably an easy one in a corner, and then close my eyes and try to recreate it accurately, including the free intersections. Once I make sure that I can count the stones, see what is touching what where, count the liberties of each string etc., I recreate it with a different orientation and then in a different corner. After doing this several times, I try to solve it in my head , though this isn't the main emphasis. The main emphasis is simply to see the stones in my mind's eye with a high degree of accuracy and relevant detail.

So far, I have been doing 3 or 4 of these a day, and I'm finding it to be a rather enjoyable exercise. It feels as if my understanding of the positions studied is deeper, and it wouldn't surprise me if I would recognize one of the studied positions were it to appear in a game. Also, I no longer need a book to practice tsumego, because I'm always carrying a few around in my head. My goal however is more of the long-term variety - teaching an old dog some new tricks is not something to be done in a few weeks. My hope is that this will help me fight my weakness at it's root. What do you think of the idea?

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Patience, grasshopper.

If you enjoy it, it can't hurt. But I think your better bet is probably just to find easier tsumego. Doing lots of easy problems reinforces common shapes and makes key points easier to visualize. Try going to goproblems.com and doing the 18k time trial, but try to go 50/50. If you can't, don't get frustrated, do the 25k and get 50/50.

There has been plenty of discussion on the forum about the benefits of easy vs. hard tsumego, but if you want to improve visualization, I really think lots of easy problems is the way to go. By the 100th snapback problem, you'll see it instantly.

[slight exaggeration] I've been doing easy problems since before you were born. [/slight exaggeration]

While tsumego is often the prescribed medicine, I'm trying to address the cause, not the symptoms.

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Patience, grasshopper.

I'd never really thought about this before.

Psychology tells us that people 'think' in different ways. Some people 'see' the things they're thinking about. Other people 'hear' their own thoughts, some people think in words..

I've always been a visual thinker. Part of this is the fact that my memory is very visual. If I have seen something, I can pull it up with a fairly high degree of accuracy.

I often tell people, in the opening, that they should read ahead and evaluate whether the end of a joseki leaves the whole board favourable, or whether they should choose a different joseki..

It never occured to me that some people don't just 'see' the board at the end of a chosen joseki line.

I always wondered how people could intentionally build a wall towards a strong group, or play a joseki that doesn't work well with the rest of their stones. I always assumed that people were just not reading/thinking about the results of the final position.

Now I'll have to consider the thought that they aren't just ignoring the result, they actually aren't seeing it.

When I was very new, I'd read joseki articles on Sensei's Library, and go to bed at night with a corner in my head, playing out the joseki, 'why here, not here, why there, not here? Oh, this leads to that.. what if.. what if.. what if..' until I felt I understood the corner. (Great way to get your mind to shut up and let you sleep, by the by. Kinda like a Go bedtime story.) Sometimes I'd play out failed fights and capturing races in my head. Or won ones. What if he hadn't.. could I have made it live? What if.. what if..

It has never before occured to me that this may not be the way that other people interact with the game.

Tsumego, if you already visualize in this manner, are all about training depth and breadth of reading. My favourite tsumego are the 'trick' ones, where if you stop reading early, a failed line looks good, or the good line looks bad. These, I think, best prepare you for a game, where you have to keep reading past the obvious and into the 'what then' level of play.

But if you can't visualize.. Well, maybe I'd start on a 9x9 board, and as I play, close my eyes. Try to see the whole board. Try to figure out the next 5 moves or 10 moves.. Then open my eyes, and try to see them there without my eyes closed. As 9x9 becomes easy, upgrade to 13x13, and then 19x19, until you don't have to close your eyes, and you can 'see' the whole board when you're reading things out.

Starting with simple tsumego works too, try to visually see the whole problem in your head, not just the weak spot and a few stones around it, but the whole thing.

Good luck!

Have you tried 1-color Go? Sounds like a good visualization exercise to me.

i did that also a little to try to memorize the problems: i would solve a problem then try to visualize it without the book and replay the variation in my head, but without trying to visualize all the connection.

No idea if it had any impact, i didnt do it much but i found it fun

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In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

In my opinion, reading _is_ visualization. So tsumego problems habituate you to positions, patterns, and changes in them when you add stones. I think your approach, while probably a bit unusual, is interesting, because much research has shown that any type of visualization improves the brain's ability to perform other, related tasks.

What actually might be more interesting, from a playing standpoint, is to visualize joseki sequences. Not so much to learn them, but to practice seeing more movement in stones than in the limited, closed space of tsumego problems.

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

This is interesting, because I'd been wondering whether there are some people who actually have this ability.

Me, I have very limited and fuzzy visual memory. I can look at a Go problem for ten minutes, but once I close the book I have no clear image anymore.

Does it depend on the size of the image? Can you play through an entire 19x19 game in your head?

Sure, I've tried one color go, and I agree that it is good visualization practice; but the drawback is, in order for it to offer a long-term benefit, one must presumably do it often and regularly, and a) I haven't found many people who want to play it, and b) it takes about as much time as a regular game, and when I have that much time to play, I generally would rather play a regular game.

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Patience, grasshopper.

When visualization skill doesn't develop when doing tsumego problems, the issue is probably doing them wrong. One should never guess the right move, since it defeats the purpose of doing the problems in the first place. Rather pick the good-looking move as the first instinct for reading, then come up all different counters to opponent. If the first instinct was incorrect, try visualizing some other move. Opponent's best counter-move against your first instinct may give you a hint. As the proverb says: My opponent's move is my move.

I seriously started training my own poor visualization skill with WBaduk's tsumego module inside the client. There's a grand total of 2650 problems to train your reading. Start from the very bottom and work your way up, even the easy problems take a minute to solve. Visualize every problem diligently and you'll see that the readiness to spot eyeshapes, shortage-of-liberties, snapbacks and others tesuji will increase.

I think daal's suggestion relates to a change in the way of thinking rather than an improvement.

If I interpret it correctly, I agree with daal that this cannot be achieved by doing more and more tsumego because you will always the do tsumego the same way you are used to.

It's not so easy to explain but most of the times, what I see in my minds eye is the "functions" of the stones but not the stones themselves. I mean, for example I recognize a shape that is likely to produce a shortage of liberties, or a snapback, etc. But I do it without actually "visualizing". It's more like the way of thinking in a chess game. But it is much more error prone in go.

Yes yes, it's really difficult to explain! For example, in the situation I mentioned above, when the stones are actually played and I look at the board, I get a different feeling of the shape (like a feeling when you look at a picture) which is not the same feeling when I was reading it!

I always thought that this shows that my reading is somehow wrong. It is interesting to hear the same thought from somebody else (if I interpret daal correctly).

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If you say no, Elwood and I will come here for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day of the week.

I know how to do tsumego the right way, but I'm not good at it. This is not due to lack of practice. I believe that my is due to not adequately possessing the pre-requisite skill of ... yeah, visualization. I think it's kind of like trying to paint a picture without being able to hold a brush properly. I like tsumego, do it regularly and have done so now for 3 1/2 years. The problem that I run into is that my reading is often faulty. When postulating stones, I am often unable to correctly judge their situation. Sometimes I don't see in my mind's eye that a stone has only one liberty or I don't see the cutting point or I don't see the ko etc. My conclusion is that I need to improve the simple ability to see stones and their properties accurately in my mind's eye. That is what this is about.

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Patience, grasshopper.

Basically, I agree with the general idea that if you enjoy doing this kind of visualization practice, it can't hurt. There's one exercise you can try if you encounter a problem that you can't read out completely because the mental image of the stones "gets fuzzy" after a few moves. Suppose the the main line of the solution is 11 moves deep. Put down the stones for the first six or eight moves and try to read it out completely. When you can do that, take away a couple of moves, and re-read. Progressively remove stones until you can read out the main line of the original problem (basically, give yourself training wheels for the visualization and then gradually remove them.)



Because of this, I have another suggestion. When you see a life-and-death problem which you can't solve instantly, get in the habit of asking yourself consciously what all of the shape weaknesses, cutting points, and potential eye points are. With practice, looking for cutting points should become second nature, and it makes tsumego easier in any event because you'll know which variations to try first.

I actually can't visualize at all, in the sense of holding a picture in my head that I can "look at" the same way that I can, say, hold a song in my head and "listen to it". I've written about it here. Obviously I can still explore a variation tree in my head, or I wouldn't have gotten to 4 kyu, but it consists more of describing the situation to myself logically, or going through my memory of a variation trying to recall if a stone has been placed on a particular point.

Paradoxically I've generally been quite good at "visualization exercises" such as "here's a picture of an abstract object; which of these other four pictures represent the same object", but I solve them by tricks like those mentioned above rather than looking at the object in my head and rotating it.

I can't play blindfold chess at all, whereas most people of my ability (1850 USCF, around 90th percentile) can do it without great difficulty. If I have a blank chessboard in front of me to use as a frame of reference, I can do much better.

I used to think that this lack of visualization ability was a giant handicap and the main thing preventing me from being a better chess and Go player, but I don't think that's the case. For one thing, when I lose a chess game, it's usually because I made a relatively simple mistake I am fully capable of avoiding, rather than because I misvisualized a future position. Also, I'm not significantly better at correspondence chess, where you can move the pieces at your leisure, and visualization shouldn't be an issue.

I do think that exercises like the one daal came up with are very valuable, because they exercise whatever calculation skills you have, whether they are visual, spatial, logical, or what have you.

Yeah, this is really important. In games like Go and chess, there are three equally important skills involved in calculation:

1) "Visualizing" a future position accurately
2) Choosing plausible moves (both now and while exploring the tree) that are likely to create good results (pruning the tree)
3) Evaluating the position at the end of a line strategically

#2, as you say, is key for solving problems in any reasonable amount of time.

Watching Malkovich games is a good way to observe #3; a lot of times you'll see players write out a variation they're excited about, followed by observers five stones stronger commenting "Why does he want to do this? The result is terrible."

Try memorizing pro games then replaying them in your head.

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I agree with kirkmc, here. Reading practice is a way to help your visualization.

I think that your idea of practicing visualization in isolation is a good one, probably. It has the benefit of focusing on this very important part of reading.

The good part of go problems, though, is that (provided the problem is constructed well) you can have feedback on whether your visualization was correct (i.e. if you solved the problem).

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be immersed

I have recently had some similar thoughts.

One thing that I noticed long ago is how some players will make a play that they learned from some problem, but it does not work because there is a slight difference in the position. It made me think that you do not really understand a problem unless you can set it up (or at least set up an equivalent position) from an empty board. Otherwise you may think that a similar, but essentially different position is equivalent.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

This seems important to me and probably that is what Cho Chikuns understands about studying L&D. That's why I have started to analyze easy problems to the elementary techniques (reduce/expand eye space, nakade, vital points, throw-ins, damezumari etc.) until I can lay out the problem myself.

I so much understand your point of view, Daniel !
I feel exactly the same: I'm currently going through 501 Tesuji (for the third time) and if I start to get a decent feel for where the first move is to be played, I'm not able to read through the 10 moves some solutions are requiring to go through. No matter how long I try, I can't get the confidence that i'll get ahead from a capturing race, barely a positive feel but it's one thing to try it in a problem and to dare to play it in a game,
I don't what to do to get deeper reading skill...