Knotwilg wrote:schrody wrote:
If we only ever taught things we fully understand then nothing would ever get taught. After all, the AI revolution in go has also shown that even top professional players were clueless and even worse: wrong, about many aspects of the game.
It depends on how you define teaching and what your objective is.
If teaching is exposure to a subject by an experienced person, things can hardly go wrong, even if the expert doesn't full grasp the subject matter themselves.
If teaching is distinguishing right from wrong, or worse, not showing things because the student is incapable, while you are incapable yourself, I find more fault with it.
You are exaggerating my point. I'm talking about the opening and joseki, which I think are not only unsuitable to teach in that second manner because the student is unready, but moreover the master is unready on many occasions. You can show things, whether they are modern or traditional, giving some background, or some arguments, but please don't teach the traditional patterns because they are "easier to understand" for a beginner. At best they are giving the teacher some comfort because they have been believing these were "true" for decades.
This doesn't apply to all aspects of Go. I can confidently teach how a capturing race unfolds, differentiating between eye vs no eye etc. I can show the vital point of a bulky five. I can explain it's valuable to know the status of an L-group. Ain't no AI ever gonna prove me wrong there.
There's a lot to unpack here.
First of all, I'd rather not see teachers reduced to just quoting factual knowledge from books. I agree that there is go knowledge that is (almost) certainly correct, such as our knowledge of basic l&d shapes. If the teacher is in possession of such knowledge and the student is ready to receive it then all is well. The problem here is that only a very small subset of go knowledge is of the factual, provable variety.
Based on this, there's two types of knowledge:
- knowledge that has been proven and is therefore correct
- knowledge that hasn't been proven (yet) and therefore may not be correct
On second thought, perhaps this matter isn't so black and white and it would be better to think of degrees of provability and correctness. I think that endgame theory is developed enough and close enough to being correct that we could allow for it to be taught without feeling too guilty about it. What about the opening and the middle game? We've just rewritten most of what we know about the opening, so should we really teach it at all?
Let's make another distinction:
- our current collective knowledge of the game
- complete knowledge of the game (i.e. the game is solved or close to being solved)
Perhaps this is what you meant by me exaggerating things. If we take the complete knowledge of the game as a reference point, then even the professional players would be limited to teaching just a select few pieces of provable information. On the other hand, taking our collective knowledge of the game as a framework would provide us with more freedom. Professional players can usually keep up with AI in the opening, so while the two of us may not be fully qualified to teach it, they most likely are. Still, they completely fall apart in the middle game, with their reading skills and positional judgement being no match for AI's. So, who are we to learn the middle game from?
Perhaps you'll still say I'm exaggerating and I certainly am. I sense that the major difference in our views is that you're less willing to teach "wrong" things than I am. I'd be interested to know where you draw the line for yourself and where you'd draw it for professional players.
In the meantime, here's why I'm not that bothered by teaching potentially wrong things.
I think that a perfect teacher is someone who has good (factual) knowledge and is able to understand each individual student's needs. Understandably, such teachers are difficult to find. One of the reasons is because someone who's only a few stones stronger will usually better understand how the weaker player thinks than someone who's 30 stones stronger. (Of course, teaching experience makes a lot of difference here.) We've pretty much already touched upon this but players of different strengths see the same board differently, e.g.:
A: Is my stone in atari? Can I save it?
B: My stone is in atari. I'll extend to save it.
C: My stone is in atari, but it's just one stone. I'll save these three stones instead.
...
D: My opponent has this weak group. If I use this move to attack it and chase it in that direction I'll get a wall which I'll be able to use to attack his other weak group. If I enclose it and get another wall, I'll get a huge center moyo and when the opponent invades... (the atari'd stone was ignored until endgame)
If the student wants to expedite their learning process then they'll want to progress through or skip through several different stages of understanding the game as fast as possible but even then, player C would be able to teach player A a fair bit about ataris and the value of stones.
The downside here is, of course, that a weaker player is also more likely to teach some bad habits. I've never had a regular teacher so I've picked up a fair amount of those over the years and am still trying to unlearn them with the help of AI. Unless the student wants to become a professional or high dan player, I don't find that all that tragic. If they do, then they really shouldn't be getting free lessons from a mediocre amateur.
To sum up:
- Teachers should always take the student's level and understanding of the game into account.
- Even professional players will likely teach you some wrong things.
- Amateur teachers therefore shouldn't feel that guilty about teaching some wrong things. Learning is a process and students will inevitably go through several wrong understandings of the game.
- Teachers should always be open and honest about the limits of their knowledge. I prefer saying "I would play here instead because..." rather than "Your move was wrong. You should play here instead."
looks inefficient and slow, but if Black plays there, White will be forced into a low position with not much territory.
makes a nice group.
is usually not good. Better just to turn, as a rule.
.
, black can push once on the 2nd line and play elsewhere again. This means that white's press at 
later on, but subsequently ignores 
?!, transposing this into a variation from a 2-space high enclosure?
John Conway had a great knack for infecting children with the fun of mathematics.
is not a joseki move here and why the bot doesn't recommend it.