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[go]$$Bc
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$$ | 6 2 4 O X .
$$ | 1 3 5 O X .
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Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Bc
$$ +------------
$$ | O O O O X .
$$ | . 7 . O X .
$$ | O O O O X .
$$ | X X X X X .
$$ | . . . . . .[/go]

Dead.

@Bill:

Thank you for making full-SGF, I overlooked (and hopefully learned) much there!

Thanks also for explaining the ko terminology in such simple words.
I had heard of a move the opponent has to answer, but did not know this was a ko-threat (I thought a ko-threat was threatening to make a ko situation).

I'm around 1D and I have been able to count a little over 20 moves deep in a large life and death fight.

On a side note, how deep can you guys read? I'm around 1D and I have been able to count a little over 20 moves deep in a large life and death fight expanding from a corner into the side/center. Makes me wonder what our resident 3/4/5D and higher can do.. and by extension a pro.

I am 5k on some servers (KGS, Fox) and 8k EGF, and I've never been able to read more than 10 moves deep (except special situations like ladders). I regularly misread move 2. No wonder I am so far from dan level.

Here's a 1 hour online tournament game I annotated with some of my in-game reading: http://eidogo.com/#300G4navp. I'd recommend Lee Sedol's commented games books to see what a top pro reads during a game. Accuracy in breadth is generally more important than high-depth (though for something like a fight ending with semeai you sometimes need the big depth too): no point reading 40 moves deep when you missed opponent's good move 4. Pros are not immune to such reading failures, I've seen plenty of commentaries with things like "I didn't expect that reply" ie didn't read enough choices for move 2.

Someone who just learned the rules of go, having a strong capacity for holding variations in their mind, might very well be able to read a good number of moves wide and deep. But the moves they are choosing to read are unlikely to be very good, and it's unlikely that they'll end up with a good result, even if they read, say 15~20 sequences - they were just all the wrong sequences.

In contrast, a pro player has the intuition and instinct to play a most-likely-to-be-correct move almost instantly, without really "reading" deep or wide.

There was a study done at some point that came to the conclusion that chess players read the most (that is, have the greatest number of nodes in their search tree) at expert level (probably the equivalent of 1-2d in go). Weaker players didn't have the ability to read more than that, and masters didn't need to because they did so much pruning, and didn't painstakingly consider and discard moves and variations that they could tell were irrelevant.

(Does one say "opponent"?)

This makes sense if you think of reading variations as a tree. A pro can just go from the trunk to the top, if we argue that the top of the tree is the right move. An amateur takes detours at lower branches and spends time reading through the twigs that a pro passes over getting to the higher branches, close to the correct move.

Sure. And at the very start of the game as black, I'm "reading" 361 branches, right?

I feel like there should be different English words to distinguish between move selection guided by intuition or logic, and consciously considering alternatives that aren't brought about immediately by intuition. Maybe it's a part of visualization. Or maybe we could call it "iteration"? Or maybe "calculation"?

I'd like to allow the term "reading" to include shortcuts or heuristics obtained through intuition and/or other means, since that's often what happens at higher levels of play.

Sure. And at the very start of the game as black, I'm "reading" 361 branches, right?

Well, only 55, right?

Bill is talking about symmetry --- all rotations and reflections are equivalent. The only unique point for the first move is the center point. All others at least four equivalents and most have eight.