Yes, that's what I'd ideally do. The comment was about my current understanding of your results, without having read your books.

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Occupy Babel!

You can read those results freely available such as those on my webpage, in rec.games.go archives or at Sensei's. You can read the small fraction of book definitions available also at Sensei's (but be aware that there are sometimes only intermediate results, not always the complete results; this is so for 'thickness'). If you want to understand my books' results, then the best way is too obvious to tell you. The second best way is much less useful because you will necessarily miss a lot of essential information (E.g., how could you guess my 14 principles for playing elsewhere in josekis?). Obviously, I won't read the books for you, but if you think to have understood something and to miss just a few last hints, then you can ask and see if I answer or if I need to protect my commercial or time management interest.

Why then do you disagree? That Go can be perceived also by art and creativity does not make the maths aspect invalid.



Can you show us how to learn well from such?

Seems you know many things about go. Then what makes the difference of strength in playing go, between you and hundreds of players stronger than you?

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Amsterdam, soon.

The question is answered elsewhere in this forum, and I think several times. (I do not recall where. Very condensed summary: I think (in comparison to stronger players) relatively slowly when it comes to unfamiliar reading (such as complicated local L&D) and choice of endgame moves due to their relative sizes) In addition:

The time I have invested in research I have invested less in strength improvement. Result: I can produce many research results while those stronger can win much more often.

EDIT:

"Slow" thinking has been an advantage for maths university study and go theory research because slow thinking allows (me) careful thinking more easily. Slow and careful thinking is a disadvantage for fast reading / endgame value calculations also because I want to be (too) careful while thinking. I rather verify each step thrice before continuing to the next reading or calculation.

Not always. What is more important is learning how to be true to your own style whatever it may be, but modifying it by what your opponent is doing. For example, if your opponent is extremely reactive to each move, it may be best to make moves that are ambiguous and have many different options, with each option benefiting you, but allowing your opponent to choose the path. If the opponent is taking this strategy with you, you may instead using more overt forcing moves. Some of the diagrams where black peeks at white here in this posting are very forcing moves and white would best connect the three stones. However, what if white decides to ignore this very overt threat and instead invade deep in black territory? It may be a true invasion or a diversionary distracting tactic. There is not always one correct answer and an excellent player realizes that to say there is one answer always is delusional and an attempt to put direction where instead the player should try to see as many options as possible and decide which one he likes best right now and why.

Look in sensei's library their is a review about RJ's work.

http://senseis.xmp.net/?JosekiVolume1Fundamentals

Oh look there is even a "meta-discussion" of someone's opinion.

I have read much (excepting rec.games.go) of your freely available work, hence my willingness to make any comment about your approach--had I only read what appears on this forum, I hope I would have the sense to not judge even a little bit.

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Occupy Babel!

The answer to "Is efficiency sente?" is no. After this answer was given several times, you can't seriously expect people to stay on topic.

I thought this insight was worth discovering, HermanHiddema, so you, tapir, seem to be on the wrong side of staying on topic. I guess that is the way it is around here, if you are wrong change the subject.

In my humble opinion, any textbook definition of (thermal) efficiency is fine, you end with the ratio of (mechanical) work done to the energy input. Adapt this to Go. "Work" is somewhat metaphorical in Go, but ratio of work done to effort made should be understandable. Incidentally, this is pretty much exactly what uberdude said at the very start of the thread.

Regarding Yi Ch'ang-ho and the supposed topic of this thread: I can't believe anyone seriously interested in the games of Yi Ch'ang-ho would dare to write: "Lee's attempt at a moyo was laughable".

Too many people treated the question as sente when tenuki was proper.

It seems that Lee Changho was a bit of a trickster, and not all that efficient after all. Maybe the strategy is really just a collection of not tesuji(optimum play), but a collection of tricks. Not the most authoritative source, a quote from a quote in senseis library, but "...Chang-ho mentions that he considered giving up playing Go because of the disgust and regret he felt after a game he lost many years ago against Rui Naiwei. After reviewing the game over and over... Chang-ho realized that he should have lost the game, and, through a long inner voyage, admitted that he was playing as if his opponent would not play very well instead of hoping that she would play the best moves possible."

http://senseis.xmp.net/?RelyingOnTrickPlays

I suffer from the twin defects of "mindless sente moves" and poor efficiency, so I find the original question interesting.

I think of efficiency as accomplishing your goals (whether strategic/global or local/tactical) with the fewest possible stones. I forget who it was who compared chess to war and Go to economics.

It seems to me that the most efficient moves are often moves which serve two goals at once. (A multitasking stone.) I have a tendency to make moves with only one purpose, which can be very inefficient. I am trying to cure this by consciously asking myself on each move "What are my goals here?" and "Are there any moves that serve more than one of them?"

Sente moves can be efficient, and efficient moves can be sente, but neither is necessarily true.

A sente move can help your opponent rather than you by allowing him to eliminate bad aji which should be left alone because later developments may make it exploitable in some way (e.g., a peep or a threat to the live of a group that accomplishes nothing and merely gives up a ko threat). Such sente moves can even have negative efficiency.

Efficient moves are often sente (e.g., a pincer which is also an extension, a threat to an opponent's group that makes your own weak group stronger, any attack on a group that also makes territory) but gote moves can also be very efficient (e.g., reverse sente in yose, a move that prevents an invasion, a move that splits two weak groups without immediately threatening them, a move that expands your moyo while making your opponent's adjacent moyo smaller). Playing a move which is miai is often inefficient because you have already in some sense achieved your goal when there are miai moves and it is better to use your privilege of moving elsewhere.

I've found that it is one thing to try to understand these principles, and an entirely different thing to try to apply them during a game when the clock is ticking.

I don't disagree with your point, but it perhaps tends to obscure the fact that great ideas are sometimes presented in awkward terms. (Particularly, it seems, by German intellectuals.)

Aaron Nimzowitsch (also a German speaker) had the same habit of coining new and somewhat confusing words to help communicate his ideas.

Interestingly, both Kmoch's Pawn Power In Chess and Nimzowitsch's My System - both of which exhibited the same propensity for using sometimes awkward or unwieldy language that is found in Robert's works - were groundbreaking books that are still read today and had an enormous influence on chess thinking.

If you allow youself to be put off by a few definitions, you may miss out on some very interesting stuff. My experience is that it usually only takes a modest effort to grasp the terminology and to move on to the main thing, which is the ideas.

Valid or not... but is it relevant?

And its not that Go is also derives such 'nebulous' concepts as art, creativity, intuition, etc. There is actually one big fundamental difference between Go and science in general. I think I mentioned it to you before, possibly more than once, but in case I did not, here it goes again:

Science is basically a community endeavor and on personal level it requires extremely high degree of specialization. What's more, this granularity becomes even more refined as time goes by and research continues. Science is composed of a large number of tiny tiny steps, each made by a different researcher, and each ultimately contributing to the overall knowledge.

By contrast, go is a competitive activity, in which at the result at the board is not decided on how deep you know this or that theory - i.e. how specialized you are. A more 'efficient' approach is to apply as wide an array of concepts as possible. The shallow knowledge of the whole beats the narrow but deep(er) knowledge of a particular aspect.

There are plenty of other differences - time, for example. Nerves... and so on.

Bottom Line:
What you are doing, I think, is enlarging the field of 'go theory' in the scientific sense. But this might or might not be the 'go theory' as the term is commonly understood - i.e. the blocks of generalized knowledge helping us make decision on the board. Oh, you make some of it as well, I know, but I think you freely switch between the two meaning of 'go theory' and that confuses the hell of of people.

PS>
Which brings us to another issue: why are people so much opposed to what you say, each time, even though you think you are correct. And you might well be correct. The issue is not of the content, but of the delivery - as somebody already pointed out to you. You are much too dogmatic, much too inflexible inside your little world for people in general to react to what you say favorably. You seem to base everything you say on some perceived set of axioms (whatever they are) and dismiss everybody not playing in the same sandbox - which pretty much means EVERYBODY.

An example of a highly dogmatic statement which might make people instinctively opposed to you is when you sai that sente-aji-keshi is conquered by the time a player reaches 4-5 dan, or something like that. But when you think about it, you will clearly understand how preposterous this statement is. And yet you seem to state it with high authority, even if you prepend it with IMX or whatever. These kinds of statements make you appear like a joke, somebody fishing for attention, rather than a serious contributor that you are. And it clouds your other opinions as well. You seem to make many statements like that, or ones which appear like that.

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Leonard: If you want to make friends you should... you know... go out, talk to people... take interest in their lives.
Sheldon: Interest in their lives? Preposterous!
And so Sheldon, after some research of children literature, goes on on to develop a formal algorithm for making friends.

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- Bantari
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