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 Post subject: Visualizing boards away from the corners
Post #1 Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2021 9:38 am 
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I have been away from serious go for a quite a while but recently I have been playing out the games of Shuei on the board. Usually I play it twice, once to get the moves and then a second to look at the board more closely. After that I can usually remember the early moves and play the game back in my head.

I have noticed that while I can replay a game in my head, mentally it seems that I have an image of four corners rather than the whole board. I have a very firm picture of the stones as they relate to the nearest corner, but my mental board gets fuzzy as corners begin to interact with each other. For example, I have a tough time picturing extensions from one corner that act as a pincer in the other (common with Shuei's games). Also, moves just out beyond the star point into the centre seem to be tougher to visualize.

This has piqued my interest because the AI has shown us the importance particularly of points just beyond the star point. I'm wondering if my visualization difficulty is one shared by other human players or just a consequence of being out of practice?

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 Post subject: Re: Visualizing boards away from the corners
Post #2 Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2021 5:15 pm 
Gosei

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Interesting post. Do you think that when you were at the top of your game you would have done better with these difficult places? I know ability to replay games is related to strength level. At a US Go Congress thirty some years ago I witnessed a pro player play through a game record of a game from a current title match, taking about ten minutes to play all the moves, then remove all the stones and replay the entire game from memory.


Last edited by gowan on Tue Dec 07, 2021 11:17 am, edited 1 time in total.
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 Post subject: Re: Visualizing boards away from the corners
Post #3 Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2021 8:56 pm 
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My thought is that the corners are the easiest parts of the board, in general - not just for visualization.

Most josekis, go lectures, etc., cover the corners. Since they are so familiar, they are easier to think about and visualize.

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 Post subject: Re: Visualizing boards away from the corners
Post #4 Posted: Tue Dec 07, 2021 2:33 am 
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I can't visualize many stones at a time, only the last move and nearby stones. Reading a ladder while blindfolded would be impossible.

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 Post subject: Re: Visualizing boards away from the corners
Post #5 Posted: Tue Dec 07, 2021 3:08 am 
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I'm not clear on the purpose of visualisation here. Is it just to memorise the game?

Depending on what is meant, I would give two separate answers.

(1) When I was a beginner I went through a brief phase of forcing myself to memorise pro games. I had a very good memory but found this extraordinarily hard. Even when I succeeded I found it a complete waste of time and abandoned the idea ever since. But what was hard was nothing to do with the length of the game or whether it was corners, sides or centre. It was always the first few moves. If I gave up and peeked at those moves, I could rattle off most of the rest of the game.

As I say, I gave that up and never found any reason to try anything similar in any other field, until I took up Scottish country dancing. The routine there is that we learn a new dance by doing a walk-through. Typically there are just four units (8 measures each in a 32-bar dance). But I found the beginning of each dance almost impossible to remember, even seconds after doing it in the walk-through. But once the dance starts and we get over the initial hiccup, the rest is usually straightforward. At first I thought it was an age problem, but eventually I discovered it was normal, and there is apparently a name for this sort of problem in psychology. No idea what that name is though, and I find it hard even to imagine what a rational explanation might be.

That doesn't help anyone, except perhaps to give reassurance if it happens to you.

(2) Much more interesting, and I think Kirby's answer is in the same bailiwick, is what is happening in your intuition. People delude themselves into thinking they control their brain. Your brain controls you.

Simply from familiarity with learning josekis, certain patterns stamped themselves in my brain (patterns, note, not sequences) and they are still there even 50+ years later, despite virtual lack of active use. This is what I would consider as visualisation. It means I can look at a game and instinctively have some sort of knowledge about how this and that pattern came about and what might happen next, with little details such as "there's a possible ko in the corner." Because of the way I learnt go, these patterns have usually been entirely in the corner.

However, some years ago, while T Mark Hall and I were transcribing the games of Go Seigen, I came across a remark by Go to the effect that people wrongly tend to ignore the side areas of the board between the corner star point and the side star point. Originally as a joke, I developed that idea into Go Seigen Groups - a safe group formed there has the devastating power of turning that quadrant into a Chernobyl area where nothing else - typically the much more numerous stones of the opponent - can thrive. But just developing that joke made it stick in my brain, and I gradually realised it was a genuine concept, not a joke. That made me look at (i.e. visualise?) these side areas instinctively in every game.

In more recent times, I have been looking a lot at old Chinese games, and development of go theory there can be described (with some artistic licence) as a search for the ideal 9-3 points. That made me even more aware of the side areas.

Blow me, I turn again, very recently, to old Edo games and notice how they were obsessed with the sides, especially, in the Honinbo family, with the 9-3 points. Then it dawns on me that the Honinbos would be the only ones lucky enough to have access to old Chinese manuals. So I end up focusing on the sides even more.

Just a couple of days ago, this had a useful direct effect. I was looking at a game from about 1690, and there was a joseki that was wrongly applied, according to the commentary, because Black played the side wrongly. Because of own recent obsession with the sides, my intuition recalled for me a game with a similar joseki but used properly in Genjo-Chitoku, a few decades later. In neither case were the sides specifically mentioned in the commentaries, but my brain had made the connection for me.

If that is what is meant by visualisation, it seems valuable, and can be developed. But not by mere repetition. It needs "effortful practice" - i.e. thinking about it and actively hunting out examples.

A friend of mine has done something similar with what we call Shuwa's nobis. Other players use them but Shuwa excels, and it is he who found a famous one in the famous ghost moves game by Jowa. Since Phil mentions Shuei, that brings to mind Shuei's famous L shapes, too.

To be specific, what I think is going on with this latter kind of visualisation is that, when you look at a new position, your subconscious brain brings up these sorts of moves for you to think about first. You "see" them before you see any other moves. I think we all do this with tesujis and tsumego moves, but it is possible to do it with other kinds of moves. I'd guess more people are now playing shoulder hits and contact plays because AI has focused their attention on such moves, so that these come up first in the visualisation queue.

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 Post subject: Re: Visualizing boards away from the corners
Post #6 Posted: Tue Dec 07, 2021 10:14 am 
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John Fairbairn wrote:
I'm not clear on the purpose of visualisation here. Is it just to memorise the game?
...
To be specific, what I think is going on with this latter kind of visualisation is that, when you look at a new position, your subconscious brain brings up these sorts of moves for you to think about first. You "see" them before you see any other moves. I think we all do this with tesujis and tsumego moves, but it is possible to do it with other kinds of moves. I'd guess more people are now playing shoulder hits and contact plays because AI has focused their attention on such moves, so that these come up first in the visualisation queue.


Some clarification is in order. My practice while replaying pro games was formed almost 15 years ago. I was studying games a lot more back then, and I found myself spending so much time looking for moves in the game diagram that I found it disruptive. This was in the Kido yearbook, with one or two diagrams per game.

I started playing the moves out once quickly to get a general sense of the game flow and then a second time through really contemplate the game. That tended to be enough that I could then replay the game mentally away from the board, visualizing the moves.

These days I can still replay the game mentally in my head, but I find that what starts as an entire board with a few stones rather rapidly changes to a cluster of four corners where the relationship between those corners becomes rather nebulous. I'll give an example below.

Click Here To Show Diagram Code
[go]$$
$$ -----------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . X . O . . O . . . . . O . . . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . , X . . |
$$ | . . X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . X . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . , X . . |
$$ | . . O . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . O . . |
$$ | . . . X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . X . . . . . . . . . . . . O . . . |
$$ | . . X O . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |
$$ | . X O . O . . . X . . X . . . O . . . |
$$ | . . O . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ -----------------------------------------[/go]


This is Shuho vs Shuei. In my head, I have a clear image of the relationship (spacing) of the stones in the bottom left) and a clear image of the stones in the top left. My sense of the spacing between the black shimari and the single white stone is quite poor. Similarly between Black's two-stone group on the lower side and the neighbouring white groups. That's not to say I can't figure out the relationship if I concentrate, but the effort is more like a mathematical calculation rather than intuitive.

On the right side I have a good sense of the white shimari in the bottom corner and the extension up to a black stone along the side. I have a good sense of the black formation in the top corner and the extension up to a white stone alone the side. But I don't have a good sense of the entire right side.

Having noted this I'm curious about a few things. Do other people have this experience? Does it change for stronger players? I hear about professionals studying in their head on the subway and I imagine they must have a much better grasp of the spatial relationships.

Also, as John has pointed our in the context of AI, Go Seigen and classical Chinese go there's more of an emphasis on areas just outside the star points. I'm also curious whether my blind spot is because I've been trained to focus on the corners and less elsewhere.

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 Post subject: Re: Visualizing boards away from the corners
Post #7 Posted: Tue Dec 07, 2021 11:29 am 
Gosei

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Could this be related to the "clumping" concept that has been discussed in research on chess (and go) reading? That is good players think about clumps of moves (stones) rather than stone by stone, perhaps something like the patterns that John Fairbairn mentions above.

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