Professional advice?

[Unusedname]

I like the idea. But I sort of disagree with it. (Although that sounds dumb)

It assumes that your motives are parallel with the pro's motives and if they aren't they should be.
The pro might be playing for thickness when there is a move for territory that is just as good. same with simplicity/complexity

Obviously I would prefer the pro over my shoulder knowing my idea but showing me a better move along the same vein, but this is a great cheaper alternative.

Although this small problem can be fixed by finding pros who have similar playstyles (To you or to each other) That way you aren't trying to mimic 100 different pros and their ideas and end up with conflicting advice.

[Boidhre]

I like the idea. But I sort of disagree with it. (Although that sounds dumb)

It assumes that your motives are parallel with the pro's motives and if they aren't they should be.
The pro might be playing for thickness when there is a move for territory that is just as good. same with simplicity/complexity

Obviously I would prefer the pro over my shoulder knowing my idea but showing me a better move along the same vein, but this is a great cheaper alternative.

Although this small problem can be fixed by finding pros who have similar playstyles (To you or to each other) That way you aren't trying to mimic 100 different pros and their ideas and end up with conflicting advice.

One thing I notice at my level (weak sdk) is that I'll guess a move and the move itself is fine but it's timing is wrong by about 20 moves, actually the upper left is bigger right now or whatever. This is useful, it's teaching me that despite seeing a good move somewhere it might not be the right move right now. I'm not sure how much of an effect it'll have on my play but it's probably good that it's being "pointed out to me" over and over.

[John Fairbairn]

I like the idea. But I sort of disagree with it. (Although that sounds dumb)

I wrote the daddy of them all, the original GoScorer best part of two decades ago, so presumably I liked the idea. But after the first flush I have never used it again in all that time. So I suppose I too "sort of disagreed with it", and must equally sound stupid. But as I think my objection to it was that it involved work, avoiding the dreaded four-letter word may not be as stupid as it sounds.

In similar vein, T Mark often told me that GoScorer was one of the most popular items on the GoGoD CD, and I saw that for myself once when we ran a competition for best score at one of the London Opens. But I tend to assume that this too was a case of first flush then zzzzzz.

It assumes that your motives are parallel with the pro's motives and if they aren't they should be.
The pro might be playing for thickness when there is a move for territory that is just as good. same with simplicity/complexity

Obviously I would prefer the pro over my shoulder knowing my idea but showing me a better move along the same vein, but this is a great cheaper alternative.

Although this small problem can be fixed by finding pros who have similar playstyles (To you or to each other) That way you aren't trying to mimic 100 different pros and their ideas and end up with conflicting advice.

I think that this encapsulates some of the real problems (other than the need to work). When I wrote GoSCorer I was inspired by a series called How Good Is Your Chess? from a magazine of my youth. That series had two advantages. One was that a pro or strong chess player would give comments on the moves and some guidance about the way play should develop. The other was that second-best and third-best moves were given a mark, too. My hints idea was one way to compensate for lack of these features. As to playing styles, I agree with that point to the extent that I included on the CD a file that listed thumbnail sketches of the styles of as many pros as I could find (quite a lot). This was meant to be used in tandem with GoScorer. I gave permission for that file to be placed on Sensei's Library and I assume it is still there. I have not updated the CD version much. I can't speak for the SL version's updates, but there are more than enough pros there so that you can choose one whose style you will know and/or can follow.

From memory, at the London Open, even the best player (a 7-dan) scored only 60%, and that included the trite endgame moves, so it is not realistic to expect high scores. The exercise only really has value if you try to work out why your moves were different, with (ugh) work as the operative word.

[amnal]

Since there are no android apps discussed above, I'll put forward my own program noGo. It's currently in beta (lifein19x19 thread here), but it has a simple guess mode not dissimilar to kombilo's including a percentage correct score.

As for the more general discussion, like others I like using guess modes, but I've found it mostly fun as a vaguely-work-like exercise on a train or whatever rather than as a deep study tool - that is, I spend time thinking about the moves, but not significantly beyond working out what they are and moving on. I think this is valuable, but perhaps optimally should be approached more like a full game review.

[Clossius]

This is a good idea, but I would have to agree that it is not %100 accurate due to reasons other have posted. BUT! I think that if you applied a database to this as was previously suggested it would make for an interesting program.

Here's the catch though, one Go game does not look like another! So it would not help your middle game or end game as effectively as one might like it to.

But what about the opening? Wouldn't this make for a great opening training program? With this program we can learn different openings that professionals play so we don't have to waste precious clock time.

Downside, you might not understand why all the moves were played the way they were played. Upside, it's free! Don't complain about a training program without comments when you aren't paying for anything!

It is a great idea though.

[TegaiS]

If you don't want to do that kind of training alone you can try to start a guessing contest here on the forum.

[daal]

I am so turned on by this idea, that I feel the need to clarify once again: It is not about guessing the move the professional made, it's about thinking about and improving your own reasoning. One is not trying to guess correctly, but rather to evaluate one's own decisions by comparing them to the decision a professional made in exactly the same situation. Because of this, there is no reason to use a program such as goscorer. These sort of programs are great for guessing how a pro plays - but for the purpose of this exercise, any old sgf viewer will do. The goal is to become aware of the shortcomings of one's own reasoning, so instead of guessing until you find the move the pro decided on, it's better to just choose one move yourself and then compare it to the move the pro chose. I assure you, practically every move can offer you an insight about your game.

[John Fairbairn]

I am so turned on by this idea, that I feel the need to clarify once again: It is not about guessing the move the professional made, it's about thinking about and improving your own reasoning. One is not trying to guess correctly, but rather to evaluate one's own decisions by comparing them to the decision a professional made in exactly the same situation. Because of this, there is no reason to use a program such as goscorer. These sort of programs are great for guessing how a pro plays - but for the purpose of this exercise, any old sgf viewer will do. The goal is to become aware of the shortcomings of one's own reasoning, so instead of guessing until you find the move the pro decided on, it's better to just choose one move yourself and then compare it to the move the pro chose. I assure you, practically every move can offer you an insight about your game.

Although this is brimming with good sense, I'm not sure that it quite hits the mark. My own observations of how pros learn suggests that there are two separate processes: absorption and adsorption.

First, for the purpose of exposition, assume simply that we have a subconscious part of the brain and a conscious one. Go uses both. The subconscious part is good at absorbing information in large quantities and sorting it, creating useful links and networks while you sleep. To feed this beast, you simply expose it to lots and lots of game records. The ideal state for doing this appears to be NOT to study a single game in the way you suggest, but simply to play it over, fairly briskly but not rushing, in a state of "No Mind" (i.e. not letting the conscious brain have a look-in). The end result is that when it comes to playing a game yourself, this subconscious beast, or intuition, will say things like, "I've seen this before - this is what happens next" or "I've seen something similar - try X, Y and Z." The more games you absorb in this way, the better the advice your intuition will give you." Most pros seem to pick a favourite collection (e.g. games of Yasui Chitoku) and play these over repeatedly, otherwise they just absorb new game after new game. As far as I can make out, though, the repetition of a favourite set is less about creating new networks in the brain and more about strengthening certain links so as to create a stylistic bias, so that when the beast throws up its suggestions, these will be biased towards a style you admire, prefer or aspire to.

The conscious part of the brain seems to be developed in a different way, which I call adsorption. Here, you are not packing your brain with data, but you simply allow data to attach to your pre-processor, where you mull it over, test it, and maybe reject it. The end result here is like a bee turning nectar into honey. This "essence" is then packed into the deeper part of the brain, more as a programming module than as pure data of the absorbed type. Data is swallowed wholesale; essence is digested first.

Again with the caveat that this is only what I have gleaned from talking to pros or reading accounts of their formative years, the adsorption process seems to be divided into three approaches. One (the main one, I think) is to attend a study group with students of similar strength and to toss ideas back and forwards, typically by group-studying a single game. I don't recall a single instance of tossing ideas back and forwards like this with a teacher.

A second approach is to study by oneself but in this case it seems relatively rare to study a whole single game. Instead, the student will study one part of one game (e.g. trying to read out a major fight), or will study a set of games by looking at a related theme (e.g. building moyos) in each. In the latter case, the more advanced students (meaning also established high dans) seem to focus on assessing other players' styles, and so act in a kind of GoScorer mode, but with the important difference that they guess only moves at critical points (i.e. those where a true choice - style - exists). Again the emphasis is on distilling an essence which can later be sent to the deeper brain.

The third approach is to have a teaching game. In other words, you get some external help with your moonshine distilling skills!

It is my strong impression that the most difficult part of this whole process is not the adsorption part, where (for adults, at least) reasoning and experience from other fields can be applied, but the absorption part. To some extent this can be said to be difficult for busy adults because the time required to play over a large number of games can seem immense, but I don't think that's the real problem. The real problem is achieving the state of No Mind, i.e. abandoning attempts to reason or to actively memorise. Indeed, if this state of No Mind can be achieved, the number of games to play over can be made rather small - usually 1,000 for 1-dan is quoted but I've seen 10,000 for 5-dan.

If my analysis is right, daal's approach seems to mix absorption and adsorption (not a good idea, as a working assumption). It also explains why blitz games are not a great idea either for players who are still at the stage where data absorption is needed. - the actual playing of the game uses the front part of the brain, is distracting and prevents No Mind (which is different from the mindlessness usually associated with blitz, of course). It may also explain to some degree why young children have an advantage - perhaps they are better at achieving No Mind.

If you are not familiar with No Mind, it goes by lots of other names and phrases in the Far East, especially on fans signed by go pros e.g. Stone Mind, Bare Mind, No Self, No Gates, Cleansing the Mind, Child-like Mind, Pure and Empty, Innocent and Unworldly, Stiffened Bones and Empty Mind, Interference-free Thoughts, Clearing the Mind, Calming Oneself, Observing Calmly is Beneficial to Oneself.... I am quoting mainly from a pile of fans behind me and could add quite a few more, but I imagine you've already got the message that No Mind is a very important concept to a pro.

There are even Japanese pros who - shock, horror - think that amateurs take no notice of this advice. From memory, I think it was Miyamoto Naoki who came up with a nice joke about this on one fan for amateurs. Instead of writing the usual characters for Musou to mean No Thoughts, he wrote characters that meant Dream Thoughts, which is what most amateur attempts end up as. In similar vein, the shogi pro Aono Teruichi once told me that pros regard amateur thinking time as dreaming time - meaning (once he'd stopped wetting himself with laughing) that instead of thinking they should spend more time just absorbing data.

[Martin1974]

Remarkable similarities to (other) martial arts. So probably there also is a culturell aspect involved, meaning the way one is trained / raised to think. I guess the way I as an European learned to think is just the opposite of "No Mind" (Locke, Descartes and Kant all would have been lousy go players, that's for sure ).

[daal]

First, for the purpose of exposition, assume simply that we have a subconscious part of the brain and a conscious one. Go uses both. The subconscious part is good at absorbing information in large quantities and sorting it, creating useful links and networks while you sleep. To feed this beast, you simply expose it to lots and lots of game records. The ideal state for doing this appears to be (...) simply to play it over, fairly briskly but not rushing, in a state of "No Mind" (i.e. not letting the conscious brain have a look-in). The end result is that when it comes to playing a game yourself, this subconscious beast, or intuition, will say things like, "I've seen this before - this is what happens next" or "I've seen something similar - try X, Y and Z." The more games you absorb in this way, the better the advice your intuition will give you." Most pros seem to pick a favourite collection (e.g. games of Yasui Chitoku) and play these over repeatedly, otherwise they just absorb new game after new game. As far as I can make out, though, the repetition of a favourite set is less about creating new networks in the brain and more about strengthening certain links so as to create a stylistic bias, so that when the beast throws up its suggestions, these will be biased towards a style you admire, prefer or aspire to.

This is actually quite close to how I envision my exercise. It takes about as much time to replay a game in this manner as playing a regular game - which for most of us would probably qualify as "brisk." Also, the idea is also more about absorbing a large amount of content than about thoroughly analyzing each move or situation. It also would make sense to choose games by a particular player to get a better handle on a certain type of play.

Not being a professional go player, I can't say what goes through their minds when they simply play over a game in a state of "No Mind," but I am fairly sure that were I to try it, I would absorb next to nothing. Without some effort to put the moves into a context, they are practically meaningless to me. It is like trying to eavesdrop on a conversation in a language one barely knows. I suspect that the pro's ability to absorb information from a game is much more efficient due to his fluency in the language of the stones.

To continue with the language metaphor - which I admit gets a bit stretched - imagine having learned some vocabulary of a language, without knowing its grammar. This exercise should help you learn to express yourself. When postulating a move, it is like trying to formulate an idea, and the pro's move is like hearing a better sentence spoken correctly. The hope is that by doing this often enough, one might learn as if by immersion.

While such an exercise might appear to the go professional sadly remedial, for a go immigrant such as myself, I have hopes that it's a step towards literacy. For a wide variety of reasons, the learning methods of professionals are not applicable to many of us. Nonetheless, I find your above description to some extent analogous to my approach. It's just for a different clientele. Not "No Mind" and not "Dreaming Mind" but perhaps ... "Open Mind?"

[Kirby]

To continue with the language metaphor - which I admit gets a bit stretched - imagine having learned some vocabulary of a language, without knowing its grammar. This exercise should help you learn to express yourself. When postulating a move, it is like trying to formulate an idea, and the pro's move is like hearing a better sentence spoken correctly. The hope is that by doing this often enough, one might learn as if by immersion.

Sometimes when I'm writing text in another language, I'll have a phrase that I've constructed, which I want to use. It seems to make sense, but I want to double check it. So, I'll go to a search engine and paste the phrase there. If I get a lot of search results that match the phrase I came up with, I feel a bit more confident that the phrase may be correct, because it's aligned with what a lot of other "pros" in that language have used. OTOH, if I don't get many results, or if I get results showing different ways of saying something similar, I try to see why this is, and it's sometimes educational.

This doesn't always work, because sometimes my sentence is about something rare or not widely spoken about. Still, for some common expressions, it seems useful.

To me, this is kind of related to the example you've provided of "hearing a better sentence spoken correctly", and I agree. It is helpful.

Sometimes, though, I feel it is more efficient to just read books in the language I'm trying to learn. It's true that I can pick a particular instance of a sentence and test it out against what native speakers used. But if you read entire books, you get exposure to - a lot of sentences, and I think that it's very helpful.

So I don't know if learning go fits with the language-learning metaphor exactly. But if it does, maybe it would be good to just play through lots and lots of games (analogous, perhaps, to reading lots of books), and then if you are curious about a particular position, do a pattern search and see what a pro did in that situation (maybe analogous to searching online for a sentence you're trying to construct).

That being said, there are probably many ways to skin a cat. So the way that I learn language or go or whatever may be entirely different than what's most efficient for you.

[daal]

So I don't know if learning go fits with the language-learning metaphor exactly. But if it does, maybe it would be good to just play through lots and lots of games (analogous, perhaps, to reading lots of books)...

That is what I want to do. But because of my poor command of the language, if I read too fast, I understand too little. I feel the need for a structure that requires me to move slowly enough to at least pronounce words correctly and try to recall their meaning.

...and then if you are curious about a particular position, do a pattern search and see what a pro did in that situation (maybe analogous to searching online for a sentence you're trying to construct).That being said, there are probably many ways to skin a cat. So the way that I learn language or go or whatever may be entirely different than what's most efficient for you.

Yes, this is the case. For me "playing through a pro game" is quite similar to "playing through a ddk game." Maybe I'll notice something interesting, maybe I won't. Digging into a database is a bit like using a dictionary: It helps to clarify something specific, but can also hinder the flow of reading. By thinking about what I would do at each juncture, the meaning of the game move becomes more apparent. It's as if the pro were making a special effort to enunciate. To return again to John's comment about No Mind, looking at a game in this manner lets me stay with the flow of the game, and I do think that this is for me an efficient way of absorbing at least part of what a professional thinks.

[John Fairbairn]

Not being a professional go player, I can't say what goes through their minds when they simply play over a game in a state of "No Mind," but I am fairly sure that were I to try it, I would absorb next to nothing. Without some effort to put the moves into a context, they are practically meaningless to me. It is like trying to eavesdrop on a conversation in a language one barely knows. I suspect that the pro's ability to absorb information from a game is much more efficient due to his fluency in the language of the stones.

I can't be sure either, but I do think this is completely the wrong approach because you seem to be looking for an immediate or visible result. To continue your language analogy (which works best if you consider your own language, which as an adult you are still learning, rather than a foreign one), if you expose yourself to lots of new vocabulary you don't expect to be able to use all these words yourself. Many words you are happy just to recognise - your passive vocabulary. More to the point, you do not ponderously analyse the words as you learn them: you do not actively say to yourself things like, "This is a mass noun, this is a common word, this is used only in a literary context, this means the same as X". Instead you let the Beast Within (the subconscious) take care of all of that for you. Once in a while the Beast will toss something back at you that doesn't seem to fit, or a teacher will bring something to your attention. For example, you learn a new noun and the Beast just assumes on your behalf that the plural ends in 's', but then you come across the word 'sheep' and sense or are told that the plural is sheep. You can just accept that, store it away in the Beast and get on with real life. Or you can be like many amateur go players and go through a dictionary and make a list of all words that have irregular plurals, learning in the process words you will never use and confusing yourself because you come across even more irregular irregularities such as 'data/data' or 'datum/data' as singular or plural or ten mile/ten miles (Scots/English). And if you have the extra nerdy kind of go player mentality you will then start trying to devise a theory as to why these irregular irregularities exist, and meanwhile real life floats on by...

No Mind is a state of alertness but with no barriers interposed that prevent efficient absorption. The commonest barrier in the Zen tradition is probably desire, which may most often equate to ratings obsession in go, though at the more mundane extreme things like tiredness have an impact, of course. As a practical step to achieving No Mind, I believe patience is the virtue to cultivate, because there is a large element of faith involved as regards when and how you will get the results, especially as you are surrendering control to the Beast. But it has to be true patience: not the "God grant me patience. And I want it now!" type.

I think this can be especially difficult in, and maybe too exotic for, a western society where we are often taught to set goals, achieve targets, tick boxes, all preferably done in a hurry in the false name of efficiency. But the irony is that if you are brought up to measure things by results, you have to conclude that, for the moment at least, the results tell us that in go it is better to be Way-oriented rather than Goal-oriented. Perhaps go is just too complex to fall to the analyse and conquer approach.

[tekesta]

I'll have to say what John is getting at is perhaps the correct approach. I've done just problems and replaying game records only for about a week, but I've felt myself getting stronger in the game, despite my recent string of losses on IGS.

Perhaps go is just too complex to fall to the analyse and conquer approach.

This has been proven true time and time again. Even in so Western a game as chess or draughts, a theoretical approach can, at best, point out a good point of departure for one to begin learning what needs to be learned. Even with a good theory in place, one still has to put in the hours I sometimes wonder if one can get good at chess simply by replaying game records when one is not playing actual games.

I think this can be especially difficult in, and maybe too exotic for, a western society where we are often taught to set goals, achieve targets, tick boxes, all preferably done in a hurry in the false name of efficiency. But the irony is that if you are brought up to measure things by results, you have to conclude that, for the moment at least, the results tell us that in go it is better to be Way-oriented rather than Goal-oriented. Perhaps go is just too complex to fall to the analyse and conquer approach.

I would say that Go has refined my goal-oriented views, namely in aiming to solving a problem without creating new ones. In fact, my way of thinking has been so deeply influenced by the game that some people say I overthink things!

[Martin1974]

The most interesting discussion I have read so far! Please don't stop!
Being really bad at go but good at drawing I might say that at drawing / sketching an alert state of not analysing is the right state of mind. There might be a connection with go because go is also a very visual thing. The right hemisphere of the brain (that's the one which does not analyse but just "sees" and absorbes) should be heavly involved.