Does the Pareto principle ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle ) apply anywhere in go? Does 80% of your territory come from 20% of your moves? Is 80% of what you learn coming from 20% of the sources that you try to learn from? Is 80% of the benefit of L19 contained in 20% of the posts?

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It's definitely something around that. Although I read and studied a lot of books by now, I can say that certain ones had a far deeper impact than others.
For example "In the Beginning" was a real eye-opener, followed by "Get Strong at Tesuji" and "Tesuji". "Attack and Defense" is another example.

Compared to the half-dozens Life-and-Death- and textbooks (like "Learn to Play Go" or "Second Book of Go"), which were very good and necessary, too, but did not have such a distinctive impact on my Go strength.

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Yes, for some values of 80 and 20.

80% of the game can be seen in the first 20% of the moves.

Sometime before move #60 the first critical mid-game direction choice is upon you, and the opening has been laid out, so I think that's probably pretty accurate.

About 20% of the time I learn about 80% of the 20% that I know and apply about 80% of the time in about 20% of the games I play. These numbers might be slightly off since about 80% of the time I only remember about 20% of the games I play, while the other 20% of the time I don't remember much at all... considering that about 80% of the 20% of the games I play are serious games. Just roughly...

Please remember that about 20% of the time I am 80% correct.
This gives you a pretty good idea of what I think about this subject... 20% of the time.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

I think only the last one is likely to be true. (And I'll let you guess which category this post is in )

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My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

Maybe there is 80% kyu and 20% dan in the population of go players

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A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

To misquote Yogi Berra, ninety percent of the game is mental, and the other half is physical.

I think it depends on the rank. Go has a steep learning curve, and at first, you can get a lot of results from a little bit of study. Later it becomes more difficult. I do not see anything special about the numbers 80 and 20, but if they are significant, I'd guess that they are only significant at a particular rank range.

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I think it's pretty common to have a situation in a game where you must make a decision, then after that choice the next 3-4 moves are forced before you have the next real decision point. In that sense, it would be about 1 of 5 moves that are really the "game changers" where you choose which sequence you want to make. The rest of the moves are more consequence of that first decision. As far as the 20% of the moves making 80% of the territory, that would probably be a matter of definition....20% probably outline the framework, but without the rest of the "fill-in" moves the territory wouldn't be secured at the end. Unless you mean territory surrounding moves vs. things like connecting moves...that could be an interesting exercise at the end of the game, see how many stones you could remove from the board without affecting the territory you surrounded......

Maybe we could view go rank progress as adhering to (a wonderfully (mis?)applied) Liebig's Law of Minimum - that growth is solely governed by its most limiting factor. Surely this is what people are talking about when they say, just study reading - that`s what you`re worst at.

Really though, yeah, if we did a study a ratio would probably turn up.

Also, Palapiku, your comments are so often insightful and/or hilarious. Just thought I'd say.

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Thanks

Actually, I reckon if this Pareto Efficiency manifests itself in go it would be in the ratio of study to practice time.

By study I mean learning new stuff (joseki, looking at pro games etc.), and by practice I mean playing or training your reading with tsumego.

Obviously you cannot get better at go (or anything else) without pushing your boundaries by learning new techniques and ideas, but it`s necessary to practice in order to turn what is newly learned into real skills. For instance, if I learn a joseki, I like to play it until experience makes it clear when it is called for and when it is not useful. It seems to me that I need to play or practice quite a lot in order to make new material stick in my mind. In other words, improving yourself requires more time spent actively attempting to apply and consolidate news skills than in making their first acquisition.

For practical examples in various fields, consider these:

* A guitar chord takes a few minutes to learn, if not seconds, but it takes a fair amount of repetition before it comes effortlessly
* You learn to drive a car AFTER you pass your driving test. It's the first few months of driving alone that teach you how to drive properly.
* It does not take very long to learn new words or grammatical principles in a second language, but you`ll be tongue-tied the first few times you try to use them in the real world.

So, I`m fairly sure that it`s necessary to have more time spent on gaining real experience than on acquiring theory, but theory is the engine of improvement (too little new and you stagnate). 20:80 seems like a very good ratio to aim at, no matter what you do.

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You have said so before, but... It does not require experience; good literature can already tell you. Do you read only such joseki literature that does not tell you about positional context and strategic choices of each joseki you learn? Experience can still be useful, but only as an addition, not as a first necessity.

Where can I find such good literature for joseki?

148 posts. You must just be pretending to be new here.

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That I cannot agree with, Robert. There is a definite and indisputable difference between knowing something theoretically and knowing something practically. If you were correct, then you could simply read a book very carefully and become stronger overnight. You know, and I know, and everybody else knows, that it does not work like that. We all need experience to make sense of what we learn. To use an example: you could read a book that explained every single aspect of riding a motorcycle, and you could have memorised it so thoroughly as to be able to answer any question on the subject, but I would surely refuse any offer of a pillion ride until you had consolidated that knowledge with a lot of actual riding time.

Maybe I`ll buy one of your books one of these days. Even so, I`m pretty sure the benefit of reading it won`t come until I`ve had time to play with your ideas and see for myself what they`re all about. My guess is that for every hour spent reading it, I`ll need four hours of playing time to notice any tangible increase in strength.

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badukJr, hyperpape: Indeed. Look for literature that teaches positional context and strategic choices for josekis, or better: for all discussed josekis (or in general for opening and middle game, but be aware that some strategic choices in josekis can lead to nothing but follow-up strategic choices, so that iterative decision making becomes necessary). (Even the Ishida is not without such advice, at least occasionally. I recall the days when I learnt from 38 Basic Joseki and the Ishida: mostly I was alone with the problem of trying to understand what every joseki was good for. It is the nature of tactical books that they do not emphasise strategy that much.)

Can we talk about the Pareto Efficiency please? I was trying to argue that it indicated 80:20 would be a good balance of play to study, but we seem to have drifted into an indirect advertisement for Robert`s books, excellent as they are reputed to be.

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Spend 80% of your thinking time on 20% of your moves.

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