Despite my general lack of activity recently, I've been wanting to do this for a little while, and John F's recent post on attitude differences between professionals and amateurs has finally made me want to go ahead.

I have gone from sagely nodding, to disagreeing, to finding annoying, to finding rather amusing, people's absolute definitiveness of statements like "this is the way he must play", or "this is the only move". I try not to do such things myself, but realise that I too am equally guilty at times of this, and should open my mind and humble myself a bit to my relative lack of understanding of this wonderful game. Even professionals seem more tentative about their comments than some strong kyu / weak dan player comments on here, and that has certainly taught me a lesson, culminated by Rui referring to herself as "the pupil" in the upcoming Asian games training.

So, here's my exercise: The following are semi-standardish fuseki-moves, with some rather odd looking continuations (to my untrained eye). They are from a variety of strengths, the upper and lower bounds of which I will not disclose. As with other similar threads, please put your answers in hide tags, and if you have reasoning behind your statements, put those down to. To begin with, these are restricted to the first 10 moves (5 each) only, and you have to guess the strength of the players.

Yes, I'm aware this is far harder than Sol's exercise, but go with your instincts - the idea of this first week is to get the taste for the exercise and hopefully build some suspense . I'm also aware that kyu players can play out professional level fusekis for the 10 moves, so I have tried to pick ones that aren't completely theory.

After a week, I will upload the .sgfs again, this time with the next 10 moves (So moves 1-20). If you feel your original instinct was wrong, update, and say why you changed your mind. After another week, I'll say what games they are

I've no idea how to "score" this one - I guess I'll do the same "-1 for every rank off your guess was, with 10 points for spot on". Any professional games would be considered 9d for the sake of scoring.

If people enjoy this, I'm may try to do a few more things in a similar vein, with the aim of challenging our conceptions of what constitutes "good moves" and "bad moves"

So, game #1:



Game #2:



Game #3:



Game #4:



Game #5:



Game #6:



Game #7:



Game #8:

Not enough moves to distinguish between strengths. Anyone from SDK through pro could easily play the same 10 moves. And even when mistakes are evident (game 6), the possible strength range is still really wide.

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Main Entry: zing·er Pronunciation: \ˈziŋ-ər\
1 : something causing or meant to cause interest, surprise, or shock
2 : a pointed witty remark or retort

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be immersed

I tend to suck at these, but it doesn't prevent me from trying:

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I've never done these, but I'll bite. First, I could just randomly throw out numbers, due to strongish players that play random opening moves (and, sometimes, the opponent obliges). Also, did you pick them all because they are misleading?

That said:

This sounds like a "minor ad hominem attack" on me - where's the admin?

If it is, I don't mind. What I really wanted to say was that I once tried something a bit similar as a way of justifying my own incredulity at the many people who talk knowingly about a pro's style. I can't remember the details now, but I think the idea was to guess which of two named players was White or Black in a series of games on the basis of style. As I recall, the results were as I expected - it was not possible to say who was who reliably.

I'm not sure if that was a harder or easier test than the one here. I'll disqualify myself from answering this one but I expect again that the results will show that a pin is as useful a way of judging ranks as any other for most of us. I include myself in that category. The only amateur I know that I'd be tempted to exclude would be T Mark.

I don't know about the Sol experiment. What were the results of that?

A more general question. You are using the fuseki as the benchmark. Would you expect different results if you used middle game positions? I'm wondering whether mistakes such as direction of play might be more obvious markers of weak play. I do know that many pros have a sort of table in their heads that tells them e.g. if he doesn't know this he can't be 1-dan, or the like, but I regret never having made notes of specific examples.

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
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My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

Not at all, actually, I found your post insightful and rather humbling - there were some really valuable points on how we view Go, our knowledge, and the learning experience. The comments regarding "false certainty" were certainly not directed at you



Very variable - some people's judgements were very good, some people's weren't



I agree, this is also interesting, and I haven't found a good way in my head of doing a similar experiment on that - midgame direction of play choice will be another, but I need to find boards where the rest of the board doesn't look too much of a giveaway.

@daniel: No, ranges are almost definitely more appropriate. Actually, that is part of what I was hoping for, "players below x or above x would never play this" is exactly the sort of interesting insights I was hoping to draw out

I may do moves 21-30 depending on responses...

I would certainly blench at having to find examples, but I wondered whether graded examples from books might do the trick. Sort of seeing one in my head in a typical layout - a title, a hint, a diagram - my eye at the same time fell on your phrase "too much of a giveaway". That got me to wondering further. You chose to avoid hints. I chose likewise. I have a feeling that's a fairly common stance in western go journals. In general, we tend to laugh at nudge, nudge, wink, wink anyway. But Oriental books nearly always have hints. Many people here buy Oriental problem books and can't read the hints. They get something out of it. They might even claim in a hair-shirt way to get more out of it (I think I would). But the Orientals may know something we've missed - they have been at the business longer than us, and so have chessplayers. In the few chess problem books I now have, the ones with hints seem the best to me, though I suppose I had always thought that my preference was perhaps because of a liking for the author, or something like that. Anyway you've given me food for thought on the real value of hints. It's bedtime now, so I shall try to use that instead of counting sheep.

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A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.

Let's see if I can get these as horribly wrong as the last time I tried to guess ranks!

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

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Occupy Babel!

Something like this page ?
http://senseis.xmp.net/?LevelIndicators

Yes.

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So you've got an eye?
That don't impress me much