When to stop reading ?

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otenki
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When to stop reading ?

Post by otenki »

So today I was solving this problem. The object of this problem is to make some kind of nice shape for black.
After some initial reading it seemed to be very easy. Just atari at O16 which is miai.
Howhever as you can probably guess (and read :-) )its totaly wrong.
Click Here To Show Diagram Code
[go]$$c
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$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . O . . . O X . . |
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$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . O . . . . X O . |
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$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . O . . |
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$$ ---------------------------------------[/go]
So after seeing the solution and reading the full thing again I realized I understood the problem in the shape but did not read far/deep enough to see that the group actualy still is in a lot of trouble after black captures the two stones.
So I started thinking; how do you decide in a game where to stop reading. I mean you cannot go on reading forever because of time limits. When do you decide ok I've read enough?

Just wondering what your ideas/advice is on the matter...

Cheers,
Otenki
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Post by EdLee »

Hi otenki,
otenki wrote:Just atari at O16 which is miai.
Could you elaborate on this statement, because I cannot parse it.

It's like: "Just knock on the door which is differentiable." -- I cannot parse that, either.

Perhaps there's something about miai that you and/or I misunderstand.
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Re:

Post by RBerenguel »

EdLee wrote: It's like: "Just knock on the door which is differentiable"
Priceless :bow: :lol:
Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net
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Re:

Post by otenki »

EdLee wrote:Hi otenki,
otenki wrote:Just atari at O16 which is miai.
Could you elaborate on this statement, because I cannot parse it.

It's like: "Just knock on the door which is differentiable." -- I cannot parse that, either.

Perhaps there's something about miai that you and/or I misunderstand.
I should have been more clear: O16 is miai for killing n16 or q17-18.
And your statement is funny indeed :-)

Cheers,
Otenki
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Post by EdLee »

Otenki, Thanks for the explanation. :mrgreen:

About your question, I think it's pretty much the same for everyone:
you read as far as you can, you do your best, then decide.

There's a recent thread about a new book on reading.

In the famous game, Fujisawa sensei spent almost three hours on one move.
Afterwards, he said he had read as best as he could,
but that he was still not sure if he could kill the big group.
( In the real game, he killed it. :bow:)
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Re: When to stop reading ?

Post by Bill Spight »

Go to move 147. :D

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.
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Re: When to stop reading ?

Post by SoDesuNe »

otenki wrote:Just wondering what your ideas/advice is on the matter...
Accept that you're not perfect and that you can learn from every mistake.

By thinking O16 was the right move (and my first instinct was pretty much the same : D), you had to go back and read deeper to see that Black is really not doing so great. Seems like very good practice to me.

In general I would say to go as far as it takes you to be content with your move. If it's wrong, figure out why and especially why you thought, your initial move was good.
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Re: When to stop reading ?

Post by Uberdude »

otenki wrote:how do you decide in a game where to stop reading. I mean you cannot go on reading forever because of time limits. When do you decide ok I've read enough?
Well, I'd say keep reading until you think you can make a good judgement on if the resulting position is a success. If it's hard to judge, see if you can read more deeply to help. Of course sometimes you can't if you reach the limits of your brain's visualization abilities. For pros often this judgement process is the hardest part of reading (where I for example may struggle to visualize reading even 10 moves deep in some situations where they can do it easily). In this case it seems you thought capturing two stones was a success, so that was your judgement failure to consider if it was good enough; capturing stones tends to make people happy. But take heart even pros suffer from this, for example it seems Yamashita Keigo 9p also thought capturing two stones was a success in the recent final Gosei title match game, but he ended up dying despite the capture: https://gogameguru.com/iyama-yuta-wins- ... o-in-2015/
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Re: When to stop reading ?

Post by 1/7,000,000,000 »

Bill Spight wrote:Go to move 147. :D
I find it hard to believe that he counted 130 moves ahead and evaluated the score correctly even with 8 hours.
Generally speaking how far can pros read? Do you know some extreme cases?
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Re: When to stop reading ?

Post by John Fairbairn »

Well, I'd say keep reading until you think you can make a good judgement on if the resulting position is a success. If it's hard to judge, see if you can read more deeply to help.
I find it hard to believe that he counted 130 moves ahead and evaluated the score correctly even with 8 hours.
Generally speaking how far can pros read? Do you know some extreme cases?
We've had this discussion before, but I'll try to add something new. First, however, I think we need to recall the famous (and, I believe, unchallenged) finding of Adriaan de Groot for chess. He has been quoted countless times. Allow me here to select a quote from "Moonwalking with Einstein":

"What de Groot uncovered was [...] for the most part the chess experts didn't look more moves ahead [than top club players], at least not at first. They didn't even consider more possible moves. Rather, they behaved in a manner surprisingly similar to the [pattern-matching] chicken sexers: they tended to see the right moves, and they tended to see them right away. It was as if the chess experts weren't thinking so much as reacting. [... and] they described their thoughts in different language than the less experienced chess players."

Similar behaviour has been documented for go.

Now one important question for amateurs is: do I attempt to behave like the masters or do I accept my limitations and simply try to improve the efficiency of my amateur method?

I don't know the answer to that question, and I haven't seen a well argued case either way in either chess or go. But more often than not, writers appear to point their readers towards aping the masters, although in practice their specific advice seems to boil down to making the best of the bad job made by the amateur approach (add more proverbs, shake well, leave thoughts to simmer and hope your mental soufflé doesn't turn out too flat).

If the inference that it is desirable to ape the masters is indeed correct, and if the short-cut heuristic approach is indeed flawed, then one hypothesis is that we need to look at the second part of the summary of de Groot's work above: learn to talk the pro talk.

There are books and commentaries on chess that attempt to do this (and FWIW they seem to me to be on the right lines, but they point the amateur also towards the need for more work, which is perhaps not what a reader who has spent $20 on a book wants to hear). There are books in the Oriental languages that do the same for go. But what is lacking perhaps is material in English for go.

This lack may not be apparent when you consider the wealth of books and commentaries now available in English, but I believe this material is undermined in two serious ways which turn a potentially rich resource into a mound of nutty slack. First, there are still far too many people who insist on misusing or abusing Oriental words or concepts. It has taken a very long time, for example, to try to get westerners to think about thickness properly, and we are still only part of the way there (if you use 'influence' you are probably still part of the nutty slack school). Inventing new words in English is an extension of this problem, and takes us even further away from the words of the masters.

A more subtle problem is down to translators. Certain terms come up over and over again in, say, Japanese, and with repetition a term and its concept is inculcated in a Japanese reader. But different translators render the terms in a hundred different ways, and so the western reader not only gets no benefit of the repetition but often even gets no sense that the base word is either a technical term or an identifiable concept.

To illustrate in the context of the present thread, a pro does not read laboriously ahead down the branches of a tree, nor does he apply special pruning techniques. Instead he applies "chunking" (just like chess masters). Boiled down to its essence, 'suji' just means chunking. It is significant also that the Japanese word for looking ahead is 'reading': in the same way that we don't read words letter by letter, go words (suji) are not read move by move. In chess, too, weak players (and writers) tend to talk about 'calculation' (move by move) whereas top masters talk about 'seeing ahead' (in chunks). That is not to say that top chess and go players never calculate, but when they do it is a confirmatory phase to check something they have already found, and very, very often they are happy to trust their intuition and not calculate at all, instead devoting their time to evaluating the whole position.

What a go pro appears to be doing is not looking ahead, say, 21 moves. Rather he is looking ahead in 7 chunks (or sujis) averaging about 3 moves each. Like all humans he is constrained by the magic number 7 - the maximum number of items most of us can hold in short-term memory - but he can use his short-term memory better than amateurs because he can remember 7 big chunks instead of 7 individual moves, or mere chunklets.

Further (and this applies to the cases of people like Jowa apparently seeing over 100 moves ahead) he can offset one chunk against another (e.g. a hanetsugi for me here offsets a hanetsugi for him there; but pros often also use much bigger chunks) and these chunks are then eliminated entirely from the active processing, though of course their effects will accumulate in the far-off position being envisioned.

What happens when even the pro hits the limit of 7, even when he is chunking? At that point he has to make a judgement, and psychological factors may impinge as much as go moves. He may, for example, decide to play safe if he thinks he is ahead, he may follow his temperament (play riskily if he's a gambler), or he may try to play delaying moves in the hope of getting clarification later. In an extreme case he may try to maximise his chunks and go for a furikawari trade.

But does he always strive to reach his limit of 7 chunks? Apparently not, judging by the evidence of blitz games (and commentaries). Instead he will go only as far as necessary until a quiescent point is reached, at which point he will switch to a positional evaluation (there are techniques for doing this at very high speed, and counting is rarely needed - as Takemiya has said in a recent book, it is true go is a game of counting, but you only count at the end of the game, not during it).

What follows from this line of thinking is that it becomes important to know when quiescence has been reached. In chess it's rather easy - when there are no more captures to be made and nothing is left en prise. In go it's rather more subtle, but the quiescent points are nevertheless very commonly pointed out in commentaries. Perhaps the commonest word used is 'ichidanraku' (a pause). This is one major element of pro talk that I rarely hear amateurs use.

Exactly what constitutes a pause point I'll leave to the reader as an exercise, but apart from completion of captures or trades there are some interesting cases that don't seem to have an equivalent in chess, and the best example may be miai. When you reach a miai point you don't really need to analyse any further because you know you will always have a good continuation from there. It's almost as if the alpha-beta algorithm was discovered by go players long ago!
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