I didn't look at other shapes with jumping ahead on 3rd line, but when teaching the the enter corner after pincer joseki I do explain why you play the hane connect to get enough liberties to jump. https://youtu.be/csIMlfMzA_k?t=237

1. The five liberties aspect: this is part of something I first came across in Korea and called it "five alive" - in local situations your groups needs (or can make) at least five liberties otherwise you shouldn't fight with it as is. Victor Guang Chow also told me a range of similar shape concepts was taught in Chinese classes (at least in Guilin), and I think Clive Hunt may have collected (and published?) examples when he and Victor were both living in South Africa. I have seen nothing like this in Japanese, Korean of Chinese books but someone may be able to provide a bit from more oral sources (e.g. the Guilin Qiyuan or Myongji University?).

2. Your examples are binary: A or B (jump or crawl). But often real life is ternary. A knight's move slide C is often the best move - it combines imlied extra liberties with extra distance. And kosumi is very occasionally a tesuji in such cases.

Bruce Wilcox uses the same theory in his e-learning course Bruce Wilcox’s Go Dojo: Contact Fights. He uses the term "unstable" (< 5 liberties), "stable" (5 liberties) and "super-stable" (> liberties).

Bruce Wilcox is the source of the five alive concept, but not the name. In working on his go playing computer program he derived heuristics that humans can use. This is one of them. The sector lines concept is another. He taught at go camps in the summer, and some of his kyu level pupils there advanced four stones in two weeks. Wilcox published his ideas in a series in the AGA Journal in the mid-1970s.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

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I would say that "awareness of liberties" is the most underestimated aspect of beginner/amateur go playing and perhaps teaching. At the very minimum it protects against stupid moves like self-atari or failing ladders. It leads to an understanding of local shape. As mentioned, it gives a heuristic for fighting versus potential sacrifice. And so on ...

Richard Hunter is another influential author who has given a lot of attention to the subject of liberties in fights. He has raised my awareness - at least for some time

Well worth repeating.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Until AlphaGo came along and suggested the below variation in the common approach a 4-4, pincer and take corner joseki, humans were blind to that 3rd option here, instead opting for the a-d exchange to gain liberties and allow the jump. But it damages the approach stone, and sometime AG (and other bots since) say it is better to directly slide because then white has some more powerful future aims of bringing out the approach stone and annoying black's group there (those aims are lessened if black plays the bot-and-now-standard human crawl under at d instead of connect at e).

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$W
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , .
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . .
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . .
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . .
$$ | . 7 . . . . . . . . .
$$ | . . . 6 . . . . . . .
$$ | . . 5 X . . . . . , .
$$ | . . 3 4 e 1 . 2 . . .
$$ | . . c a b d . . . . .
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . .
$$ +----------------------[/go]

To refine that a bit, with AI we have entities whose behavior we would like to understand, but they provide no explanations. Humans are very good at coming up with explanations. OC, not all of these pan out. Thor does not cause thunder. Now we know what does, but it took millennia to figure it out. We did so by means of science. We can use a scientific approach to analyzing the play of AI bots. While knowing current concepts, such as kikashi, can help, strength at go is not necessary.

I was one of the first to notice that AlphaGo played pincers less often than humans. In the Master games, given the first chance to play a pincer, human pros did so around 20% of the time, while Master did so around 10% of the time. A 10 kyu could have shown that. I also noted that when Master did pincer, it almost always had backup strength on one side or the other. That way, if the pincered stone jumped out, it could only counterattack in one direction. This observation may be on the SDK level. These observations produce a heuristic: Wait to pincer until you have backup. OC, it is only a heuristic, there are exceptions. But we can study those in a scientific manner, as well.

Recently I have come up with another observation in the Elf commentaries of GoGoD games. It is usually right to occupy the last open corner. I found it while looking for examples of the last play of the opening. In vain. Elf does not seem to recommend those plays. Again, it did not take much go knowledge or expertise to make those observations or to come up with that heuristic. Persistence was the main virtue.

Edit: BTW, many people have noticed that today's bots play kikashi more often than humans. Why, we don't know.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

I was impressed to see that thirdfogie had independently developed as personal guidance one of Sonoda's proverbs:

I first became aware of this when John F recommended Sonoda's book (in Japanese) back in October 2016 苑田流格言のすべて:

This guidance is:

自分の石数の多いときは、石をタテヨコに使う (When I have more stones, play "tateyoko" = criss cross)
自分の石数が相手より少ないときには、石をナナメに使う (When I have fewer stones, play "naname" = diagonally)

This is essentially what thirdfogie wrote - if your opponent is playing attach moves inside your territory, then play solid moves along the lines - don't play diagonally as a cross-cut helps the player trying to live or settle the position.

I learnt this heuristic some 3 years ago and have found it most useful both during actual play and when reviewing games.

Sonoda introduced a small number of heuristics in his book, illustrated them with examples and then commented on seven professional games. Its most interesting that thirdfogie developed one of them independently.

An earlier book of Sonoda's - "Go Strategy" - is well reviewed at Sensei's Library:

https://senseis.xmp.net/?GoStrategy

John Tilley

Another word for criss cross (tateyoko), particularly in a game context, is rook-wise. As in, Go stones are rook-wise connected.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Hi! This is my first post on this forum. I had a very similar experiment last summer so I thought I should share.

What I did was write a shell script using sgf2dg that converts go problems in an sgf file into png images, then creates anki flashcards out of them. The workflow was to load up a game record, manually find the mistakes with some help from ai, then create multiple games in a single sgf file, each containing a single problem created from the situation when the mistake occurred, and the correct solution. Next, run the script on the sgf to create an anki deck with all the problems which I can import into anki.

I don't think creating the actual problems is something that should/can be automatized. For one, because I don't necessarily only check the big winrate drops, but also the parts of the game where I was unsure if what I did was a good idea. Also, the "optimal" ai variations, where it keeps tenukiing all the time, are not very digestible for me. I'm usually more interested in the good local moves, and than I have to ask more questions from the ai to understand why those are good moves. Just slapping the standard ai variations at the big winrate drops on the flashcards wouldn't be very educational.

My experience was that srs can certainly be helpful, but you should work with very different settings that what you use for learning languages, otherwise you can easily end up wasting time overreviewing mistakes that you are already sick of instead of playing more games. The goal isn't really to learn solutions to particular problems by heart, but to recognize certain underlying patterns. The standard spaced repetition algorithm is supposed to ask you the question again just barely before you forget the answer, but I think for go problems, It's best to be asked the question again after you did forget the solution to the actual problem but solving it again is still easier than originally because you remember some patterns to look out for and viewpoints to consider. I ended up with setting the minimum interval between getting the same problem to 1 week (the default is 1 day), and the new interval in case you fail to answer correctly 50% of the original interval (the default is to set it back to the minimal interval). I also use an addon called "MIA retirement" that automatically suspends cards in my deck which reach a certain interval length, it's set to 3 months currently. This because I don't really want to keep reviewing the same mistakes until the end of time. Even with all these adjustments, the anki time felt too long, and in most cases, I still just outright remembered the solutions of the problems on the cards. When this happened I considered the criteria for pressing "good" to still read things out and verify that what I remembered is correct.

Unfortunately, my go time was cut back around mid-autumn, so I stopped doing the spaced repetition. It did make me improve, especially in the direction of play department, but I think it was a bit of an overkill. Nowadays I have more time again, but I'm content with just reviewing my reviews about 1 week after originally doing them.

I'd like to do something seamingly simple: add a variation to an existing game that improves on the actual game and add a comment to it, e.g. "Black is strong around here, so the double hane is powerful." I'd then like to export a series of diagram pairs: actually played and improved variation.

I'm thinking about a poor man's solution where I comment a position in a special way that can then be parsed by a script, e.g. "Black is strong around here, so the double hane is powerful. <43>". In this example, this will use the moves until move 43 of the main variation (the actual game) for one diagram and the complete variation (the improvement) for the other diagram, with the comment used as the caption for the latter.

Does something like this exist, or do you think I'll have to write it myself? Or perhaps there's even a better way?