I mentioned in another thread a book on thickness and moyos by O Rissei (Teatsusa no Wana). I said it was especially valuable because one aspect was that he stressed "using" moyos rather than "making" them. I imagine some would like to see an example.
But a word of warning. If you want to come to this with the urge to say "Ah, but AI says this, not that" or "My patented theory says you have count gefurtels instead" you are wasting your time with me.
It is necessary to understand that the vast majority of Japanese go books have been written for go fans, not budding professionals. And to appreciate that properly you also need to understand that until fairly recent times, education was very highly regimented in Japan. The very word for "learn" (manabu) has the same etymology as "imitate" (mane), and most education was done by imitation and rote memorisation. It was similar in China. Go Seigen liked to point out he had to learn about 200 Chinese classics by heart, and if he failed to recite them accurately in front of his father, he would be beaten across the calves with a bamboo rod. It was actually the same in many parts of the world - for me it was the ruler or the tawse. But in Japan it went a step or two further and extended even beyond school. In the post-war recovery period there was a pretty strict paradigm of school, crammer, Todai (or other university), salaryman, karoji - death from overwork. This was the joseki of life.
There were critics of this joseki, both at home and overseas. They pointed out that it made Japanese (of the period) efficient but lacking in creativity, for example. The salarymen themselves similarly grumbled about the system, and looked for ways to satisfy their creative urges. For very many, go was a satisfying outlet. On the board you could play as you wanted and not as your boss or society wanted. But, at the same time, your free-time was limited. You wanted to learn something about the game, to really unleash your creative impulses, but it all had to be in bite-sized and palatable chunks - suitable for the daily commute, say.
It's all a fair bit different now, of course, but then it shaped how go books evolved. Among the things that go writers learned was that you had to stress the freedom go gave you. So Takemiya was wildly popular when he told fans not to worry about imitating pros - just play what you want to play. He was far from the only one with that sort of message. And pros like Kitani who may not have written books in such a jaunty tone but played their own games in a dogma-denying way were always the most popular with fans.
Fans asked in magazine polls fans what they liked most about the game always highlighted this freedom or creativity: "no two games ever the same". It has even been suggested this was a major reason for the huge post-war popularity of go in Japan (tradition and cheapness were other obvious factors, of course, but an often overlooked one was the simplification of kanji and the use of katakana; pre-war go writers mostly saw themselves as literary figures, not educators).
But freedom is not random. To appreciate your favourite pros, and to get the satisfaction of winning which is at least as strong as being creative, you needed some knowledge, some technique. Quite a bit of this came from the old "imitation" method - memorising josekis. But a lot came in nugget form, especially proverbs. However, an awful lot of knowledge picked up this way was close to random. You had a lot of ingredients but no recipe, so no cake. One of the major themes that evolved among go writers of the time, therefore, was "consistency". It didn't matter if you lost a bit here, and a bit there, so long as you followed a consistent plan. This approach was especially popular among "lesson pros", of course, as it worked especially well in the handicap games they gave as lessons.
With time, this approach, too, evolved, into what I believe is still the dominant ethos in Japanese go books today: that is, make only moves that you understand. A higher form of consistency, if you like.
We can expect evolution here, too, of course, especially with AI on the scene. But that hasn't happened yet, and may not for quite some time. A lot of the flurry of AI activity among amateurs can be explained, in my view, by a slightly guilty feeling of needing to justify spending a fortune on powerful computers. The obvious counterpoint to this cynical view is, of course, the plaintive "I've spent a fortune on books - I really need to trust them." But it's not a true dichotomy. Books were written to help you understand something. AI was designed to help you understand everything, and thus nothing.
That will change, eventually, but by how much? I think the real point will still boil down to: "I'm an amateur. Amo, amas, amat and all that - I love go." No matter how much you spend on fancy hardware, or bookshelves full of dead trees, the real object of your attention is nothing more a board with 300+ black and white counters, and the patterns they make. From Day 1 of our acquaintance with the game, we feel the urge to make sense of those patterns. But even if we all feel the same urge, the urgent feeling - in both senses - is far from the same in all of us. Some pro wannabes want to drive to their go destination in a Ferrari, and stuff the scenery; most, who embrace fandom as much as freedom, want just to saunter along in a pony and trap, take in the sights, and drop in at the local hostelries along the way. Personally, I think the fans will always heavily outnumber the budding pros, simply because without huge numbers of fans, pros can't really exist.
So bear all that in mind when I give an example from O. He is not telling you how to play like a bot. He is not even telling you how to play like him - many pro writers specifically say such things. He is telling you, as a fan, to make moves you understand. Like almost all go writers of his ilk, he is giving you a go bread-maker. You just have to understand enough to get the right ingredients, follow the recipe consistently, then sit back and enjoy the delicious aroma and taste of fresh go, made just as YOU like it.
In the position below O is asking you to choose, as White, A, B or C. Remember that he is talking about "using" a moyo, and a further clue for the book reader is that his general theme in this part of book is "putting a wick in your candle"!
I will tell you straight off that Leela likes a clutch of moves just to the right of C. It also found O's actual choice acceptable in the sense of being within a close margin of error (the Spight margin!), and also showed a follow-up line pretty similar to O's. The reason I mention this first is that I want to ask you something. Let's take a move to the right of C, at G3 for example. It's a good move. But do you really understand why? Do you feel this is "using" your moyo? Or your mojo? I would answer no to all those questions. I would answer yes to the same questions for O's line.
I'm not going to give O's explanations of the two moves A and B (which are not duds - inferior, perhaps, but mainly harder to understand) and will just focus below on part of what he says about his "right answer" - C:
This is what he calls putting a wick in your candle (芯を入れる). Or lead in your pencil, or marrow in the bone. Yeth, he is telling you to take the pith. That's the foundation for using a moyo.
The next diagram shows the application (I omit the move numbers and variations, but it starts with Black invading the moyo on the lower third line).
The use of the moyo is obvious here. The potential White territory on the left has become more real rather than virtual, and White has added outside strength that gives him options at the top and on the right and in the centre. Black has invaded and run away successfully, but really he has gone poaching and hasn't come away with even a rabbit, let alone a salmon.
There is, as with all contrived examples, an element of katte-yomi, but that's how most amateurs read anyway, and I do believe most amateurs can understand this way of playing, whether or not they would choose it for themselves.
I expect in practice many amateurs would choose B. It's actually a very good move, and one that Leela likes. But O tries to dissuade us from playing it because it's harder to understand. The line he shows has Black invading the lower left corner, which takes away White's "easy" territory. White gets an outside shape but one that does have weaknesses and so White is left with what, for amateurs at any rate, is the very much harder problem of making territory in the centre (or worse, attacking a non-existent Black group!). As O puts it, the stone at B is then not really working. A, incidentally, obviously has some merit but is basically just the wrong direction of play: Black will answer on the lower side.
Here's a harder example from O, much boiled down to this single diagram by me. It's very different superficially, but still contains as its "pith" the idea of taking the pith (the Black triangled stone) rather than adding peel to the orange.
Black's basic problem here is that his moyo is actually just too big. Add to that the fact that his stones at the bottom are thin, and also that the triangled White stone is a viper in the bosom. I don't believe that the typical amateur dan player properly appreciates the nuisance value of that stone. We might well notice it, and it might even fire up some axons of association, but only a pro who has looked at thousands of games really appreciates it. My own heuristic is not to understand it, but just to double whatever negative nuisance value I put on it. I take the same approach with weak groups: if I think a group is weak I assume it's really twice as weak.
So, given that, you might see why O dismisses expansive peel-adding moves like A out of hand. B is a little trickier to explain, but it has two drawbacks. One is that it is too close to thickness (above) and the other is that it doesn't address the weakness of his stones just below quite as well. O is also not fashed about moves such as White C. Black answers at D and says, Thank you very much for solving the problem of my overstretched moyo for me." Being a pro, he is also not bothered about White E, despite the presence of the White triangled stone. He would kill White. But if needs be, a Black amateur can always follow Takemiya's advice on moyo invasions: let him live small. You keep most of your territory, and better yet firm it up, and gain massive thickness to compensate for what you do lose. Takemiya's fundamental point is the same as O's: make moves you understand. In both cases, despite the different outcomes, we can see the use of a moyo as a Venus fly-trap.
And if you do really have that nagging worry that you maybe did spend too much on your new graphics card, you might like to know that Leela likes O's move very much. But with the ten-quid book, you now know why!
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