Not necessarily. For some people, intense effort on one problem will not help the principle to stick. They need to contexualize it more broadly.

Only kind of. Thinking hard the first time helps you identify the underlying principles better, perhaps, but it still doesn't ingrain the pattern into your head. Regardless of how you solve it the first time, you'll still have to see the same pattern over and over, whether in similar problems or in games. You know how, in Tesuji, Davies first walks you through one example of each tesuji and then gives you different problems on each type? This is the same as clicking throught he first time and then trying to recognize it afterwards. You still have to read in games and later problems to know if it IS that tesuji, but at least you know to consider that starting point as an option.

I think there's room for both, and the issue isn't black and white. Tesuji and shape problems are particularly hard if you've never seen the shape before, but become much easier if you've been shown it a few times, whether you read it yourself or not. Again, I'm not knocking reading, you always have to read to make sure that squeeze or nose tesuji or whatever actually works here. However, playing through tsumego quickly CAN have some value, similar to watching lots of pro games, in that you start to see 'Oh hey, this looks like that connect-and-die problem I kept seeing recently'.

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Someday I want to be strong enough to earn KGS[-].

Well, I guess that could be the case, but if that's the only reasoning there is, I don't think this method of study is for me.

I can't really expect to understand it if the rationale is that it "works for some people".

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be immersed

I've never read Tesuji, but I get the point you are trying to make.



I agree that it has value. It has always just seemed more effective to me to go the other route.

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be immersed

But I mean it might be more effective to read hard many times.

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be immersed

Of course not. This was never about what method of study is for you, it was about whether the method of study you prefer is for other people



Well, no, not by itself. But if you go back and look at the description Marcus gave that should help explain WHY it "works for some people." It's more like a paint can than a screw. It doesn't matter how hard you press the paintbrush against the canvas if you want to paint a pattern on it. With a screw, the tighter the better it remains in place.



The brain does a lot of unconscious processing. Conscious effort does not necessarily correspond to the level of unconscious processing. In some people, it can actually discourage it. I know I am this way to an extent. If I focus on something past a certain level of intensity, I do not tend to learn very well.

All I can really say is, "good luck"

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be immersed

I don't think we can get very far in this discussion since the most any of us can bring to the table is speculation. Even if some of us have improved using a certain method, it is hard to say if it is due to that method or due to something else.

So I'm not sure if it's productive for me to continue to try to force my opinion.

I'm going to sign off of this discussion.

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be immersed

Not to promote my own post, but yeah.

One interesting recent finding is that if you ask people to answer a question before telling them the information, they retain it better. This is what you'd expect if it was a problem that they can solve (solving an equation will reinforce it, as opposed to being told the answer), but it appears to work even when the learner doesn't have any real way of knowing the information.

Now that doesn't adjudicate between quickly trying to solve a few problems, vs. focusing for a long time on just a few, but it does say that you should -almost always- try to think things through before looking up answers. That's obvious with tsumego, but it might apply in several cases that you might not expect. Perhaps try treating joseki or fuseki study as problems: play a few stones, then try and think through responses before looking at book continuations. Ditto for professional games (hey...prokovich!)

I can't back up those ideas in the last paragraph with direct evidence, but they are at least suggested by some research.

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Occupy Babel!

I see that the discussion is going great guns. I do not have time to say much now, but let me add a couple of cents.

Everybody is different. What works best for pros may not work so well for amateurs, and what works for dans may not work for DDKs. (I would love to do some experiments, but that is not so easy in the West. Where am I going to find 200 DDKs for a controlled experiment?)

About the question of the snapback:

First, iI you have to go through ten of them to get the idea, maybe you should take up tiddledywinks.

Second, thinking hard is neither good in itself nor necessarily productive. All you get for effort is an E.

Third, seeing is better than reading. (I do not mean seeing a mirage, of course.) There is evidence that pros' brains are different from amateurs' brains, because of differences in childhood. Pros do more unconscious parallel processing than amateurs.

Fourth, conscious training can improve unconscious processing. Reading practice can improve seeing. But there are other ways to improve seeing. Which is best is an empirical question.

Fifth, overlearning is important. Even if you have learned something, it can help to go over it again. (This does not mean rapid drill, which I have questions about. Rapid drill can lead you to ignore significant features, because you use other cues for recognition.) In the case of snapback, maybe a beginner will need three examples to learn the idea, and two more to overlearn it.

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FWIW, my opinion is that low level tesuji, like the snapback, are best learned by observation and explanation, rather than by trying hard to figure them out. (Trying to figure them out may have other rewards, however. ) At the dan level, however, I think it is the opposite. Dans see a lot. Learning to recognize a specific shape and a combination of suji will not be of much benefit, whereas learning to read the position out will usually be of greater value.

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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.

The key here is not to just stare at the paint in the can. You have to use the paint.

Let's back up for a moment and examine our goal. My goal in doing Tsumego is to improve my reading ability. Improving my reading ability is what improves my overall skill in Go. How I use Tsumego to improve might be different, though. Everyone has to find their own way of doing things that works best for them. Because I have a specific goal (instead of to simply "get stronger at go", I have "get stronger at go by improving my reading") I can evaluate my progress in a more direct way (instead of "I went up in rank" as a sign of improvement, I can examine my games and the tsumego I undertake and see what shapes I understand and what shapes I don't) and adjust my process based on that improvement (or lack thereof).

In my case, the way in which I apply the shapes and the ideas I've just learned has an impact to your overall style of play, and in some ways the application is influenced by my style of play as well. For me, learning is not a very structured process (beyond, of course the idea of "start simple and build from there"), and it shows in everything that I do.

I learn quickly, and it's a good trait to have, but my learning is very broad as opposed to gaining extreme depth in any given subject/skill.

Let's take another skill that I've learned over the years: piano. If you set me down a a piano and put a piece of music in front of me, I can struggle through and learn the piece slowly, reading the music and studying. For me, this is a SLOW process. My wife, however, can sit down at a piano with a piece of music in front of her and it takes literally a quarter of the time for her to learn the piece (given at least a basic level of complexity). However, give me a recording of the piece and have someone sit down and play it for me a few times, and I can learn the piece much faster, in some cases without the actual sheet music. That's how I learned the first movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and it took me very little time (relatively) to learn it. My wife would not be able to learn a piece in this way.

Expanding on this, I can take all the examples of songs that I have learned and memorized, and I can apply the ideas in the form of my own creations on the piano. In doing so, I'm usually at the keyboard playing around, figuring out what I want. I go to the actual keys earlier than some composers would. My wife does not attempt composition, but I've found that those who have similar skills to her will tend to have a good idea of what their piece is going to sound like BEFORE they try it out ... usually based on musical theory. I know theory at this point as well, but I learned it by playing, not by studying.

Getting back to Go. At this point in time, I work through basic tsumego in the same way most people do: I read the solution, make sure there aren't any traps, and then play it out. This whole process takes only a few seconds. How I developed that "mind-picture" that gives me the ability to visualize and quickly evaluate a situation is though repetitive use of the patterns I see. I got here by playing through solutions and learning to recognize the shapes that way. A lot of this was done by just playing games, and losing a lot.

For harder problems, I tend to rely on intuition. If my first line of play doesn't work, I think of another one and play it out, not worrying about variations. I do the same thing in most of my games. Guess what? I fail a lot, especially when the situation is strange to me. However, I've developed some very good intuition over the course of my go-playing "career". If my intuition fails, I go back and examine why and sharpen that intuition for later games.



Have you ever taken a tsumego and the solution and just played with stones on the board? Do you play out different ideas, even though you've already got the solution? Do you change the shape (add/remove or move stones) and try to apply the same solution? All these require thinking, and all these are interesting exercises. You can do them in your head, or you can play them out, but the key is to THINK about the shape and add it to your understanding of the game. In both cases, you need to interact with your internal representation, and that internal representation will be affected by your efforts.

There are no shortcuts. If you don't put the effort in to learn and grow, you won't. I've spent a lot of time examining how I learn (not anyone else) over the years. Because of this, my strategy and process for learning is constantly changing to meet what I expect is going to be effective given the time and resources at my disposal. Solving Tsumego the "right" way all the time is not as cost effective as my own process tailored to my specific learning strengths.

Oh, and since it just popped up, read Bill's post.

That is very interesting. I suppose that it did not occur to the researchers never to reveal the answers to the subjects. Yet you will find such advice for working on tsumego!

It certainly seems like a good idea to activate problem solving before revealing the answer. But then the question arises, how long do you wait to reveal the answer? Or is it even a question of time?

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

OK, I'm a liar. I'll get back into the discussion.

I'm not sure I understand what is being distinguished here. Is there a finite number of shapes that somebody has to learn before being a dan player such that they can get to the level of "seeing a lot"?

Why is there a line between dan players and kyu players in terms of how they should learn?

I have some dan-level accounts on a couple of go servers. Does this mean that I now "see a lot" and learn in a different way than a kyu player?

It seems that go is more complex than to have a simple division like this (eg. Before you get to level X, you learn this way. After, you learn this way...).

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be immersed

Play it out in your head? If so, you're doing the same thing as me.

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be immersed

The point about never revealing the answers is interesting. You can imagine analogues though: posing an undergraduate mathematics student a problem they cannot hope to solve, but which they can make _some_ progress on. In middle school, two of my friends and I had external tutoring by a professor of engineering. I distinctly remember him having us help design a gazebo he was building--it took several weeks of stretching ourselves to figure out various aspects of the design. We did have external guidance, but were given substantial leeway to botch things before he redirected us. Of course how do you then test learning?

For the second, I can only assume time was just a proxy for various thought processes that the students engage in--the issue is what kind of attention they're giving.

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Occupy Babel!

Who said anything about playing it out in my head? I decide on a line of play and make my move. If my opponent deviates, I then choose a different path.

The best part about this game, especially now that I can play online, is that there's always another game to play after the current one.

That line in particular was about playing the line I thought about out on the board during Tsumego. I count the number of times my line fails before I find the solution. I then examine why. This helps me a lot more than staring at the board and wondering whether the line in my head is good.

I guess I just don't see how it is helpful. For me, if I try to "examine why", it's obvious - I die this way... Or he lives this way.

If people could take back their moves during the game of go, it wouldn't be a fun game, in my opinion. You could go, "oh, I lost... Let's reverse a little bit and play that part out, again".

They key thing that makes go interesting to me is the fact that you have to be able to read ahead and calculate - without playing it on the board.

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be immersed

I drew a similar picture before, but I'll use it again:



Let's imagine that the image above is a game tree for a particular position. The current move is the blue root node. When I'm at a blue node, I'm not aware of what the solution is.

A red node is a losing position. A green node is a winning position.

It is not interesting to me to spend my time studying looking at a green node, or looking at a red node.

A green node is obviously green. A red node is obviously red. It is more interesting to me to practice traversing this tree. When I practice traversing this tree, I can learn to prune it. Eventually, the blue nodes become green or red nodes, and I can solve a problem quickly.

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be immersed

I guess if I argue with myself, playing a problem out on the board could allow one to memorize whether a blue node was red or green...

But that still only works for specific or common positions. If you can enhance your traversing ability, you can work with ANY problem more easily.

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be immersed