Strategy vs tactics ( aka theory vs reading )

[LocoRon]

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Click Here To Show Diagram Code

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Tactically, both a and b are possible. The difference is strategic.

[Hare]

I was told that memorizing joseki was for those at or about dan level. Joseki works when applied at the right time and in the right direction. I find ddk don't yet understand what is happening on the whole board. Understanding the big picture is vital to applying joseki (timing and direction of play). Many suggestions given I whole heartily agree with.

[dfan]

"Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory" (Sun Tzu)

I firmly believe that I spent too much time reading strategy books while reaching my current level, and didn't do nearly enough life and death. It's been a significant barrier to further improvement.

I'm still a few ranks behind you, but I feel the same way. Lately I have finally been making tsumego the focus of 90% of my study and I can really feel my muscles getting stronger.

[Kirby]

I think that what people commonly refer to as strategy is theory that they read in books, which they'll use as heuristics to deal with situations. Go proverbs might be an example of this.

I think that you can get a lot of these heuristics and go proverbs under your belt, and it may help some of your decisions - but I don't think it's a good substitute for reading.

I think that if you focus only on reading, you will not need the heuristics and go proverbs you read in books - you will learn these things yourself from experience.

I think it's important to make this decision, because it is easy to cut back on reading and think, "well, I'll just apply this heuristic". Somebody with sufficient reading will then find out where the heuristic goes wrong and beat you.

No, I think Numsigil's distinction is better. "When to run and when to die" (furikawari, I presume he means) is definitely strategy. Tactics are the ability to make the outcome of a given situation work in a direction you choose, Strategy is deciding what direction you want the game to move in, and therefore which tactics will serve that purpose best. Lee Changho's quote where he says the hard thing about Go is not reading 100 moves ahead for three different candidate moves, the hard part is deciding which of those three is the best, is pretty much the very definition of tactics vs. strategy.

More concretely: Tactical knowledge shows you that a two-space extension which is pincered on both sides may be attacked from above, either side, or with a tesuji from underneath. Strategy is figuring out which of those ways to attack is the one you actually would prefer to do.

Whether that's what "most people mean" could be another story (your thought might actually be what quantumf means,) but as far as the words themselves go, that's what they mean. There are very few books that actually talk about strategy in a concrete fashion (in English, at least) AFAIK - parts of Attack and Defense, I guess The Direction of Play... other than that, really good game commentaries are the only sources I see.

I'm not sure that I really agree - I still think that such decisions can be determined by appropriate reading. But maybe it doesn't matter.

What I am trying to point out is that I feel there is a tendency for people to shrug off the need to improve their reading, relying on what they call "strategy".

Reading a book on go theory may be interesting, but I think it is much more effective to your go ability as a whole to simply improve reading. Considering your example, improved reading can let you know which way to attack a group. It's not something you need to read in a go theory book.

If you want to call this type of reading X, and another type Y, then that's fine with me. But I get the feeling that people neglect improving their reading, when I think that's really all that's important in the game.

[Kirby]

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Tactically, both a and b are possible. The difference is strategic.

I would say that, "locally" a and b are possible. The difference is the global position. In both cases, I think that a fundamental reliance on reading will get you further than what you read in a book on go theory.

[CarlJung]

The difference is the global position. In both cases, I think that a fundamental reliance on reading will get you further than what you read in a book on go theory.

Aaargh...

If you are going to define the terms whichever way will suit you, there is no point in trying to argue with you.

I can't make sense of your post but I like it anyway since I'm quoted in your sig.

[flOvermind]

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Tactically, both a and b are possible. The difference is strategic.

I would say that, "locally" a and b are possible. The difference is the global position. In both cases, I think that a fundamental reliance on reading will get you further than what you read in a book on go theory.

That's exactly the point. Since both are "locally" possible, pure reading will never be able to tell you which one of them is better. You'll just arrive at the conclusion that both are playable. But there are global positions where one is clearly better than the other. I think it's not too far fetched to assume there are global positions where one of these two moves is a game-losing mistake (in high-level play of course).

But of course, reading is still a necessary prerequisite to telling which one of them is better. You can't really make a "strategic" decision between these two moves if you can't read ahead possible continuations and visualize the final positions of each sequence (although that particular position may be a bad example, since we all know what the final positions look like without reading ).

So what's my point? I think you can't really make that distinction between "tactical" and "strategical" decisions. You need to base your strategic decisions on results obtained by reading (e.g. only cut when it's possible). And you need to evaluate the final positions of your reading in terms of strategic aspects (ok, I can cut, but is the result good for me?). And you need strategic decisions to guide your reading (e.g. don't even look for a capturing sequence, because this group is light). And you need reading to guide your strategy (e.g. does my position contain any exploitable flaws, or can I attack freely?).

[topazg]

In both cases, I think that a fundamental reliance on reading will get you further than what you read in a book on go theory.

You'd be surprised how much your reading can be improved by books on Go theory. Reading is a sense of shape, a sense of tesuji, and visualisation skills, of which I would have said the first two of the three comprise 90% of reading ability and are very easy to improve with Go theory books, and the latter is improvable only with practice.

How often have you found a corner/edge shape where you can throw in followed by picking the key eyeshape point in what's left, or something similar? How do you know about the throw in? What about the key eyeshape point, what made you see it? Most of reading can be greatly improved by studying tesuji techniques, and shape techiques (moves that avoid being squeezed for example) as opposed to simply trying one problem after another.

Both strategy and reading/tactics require a fair amount of effort on both the theoretical side and the practical side.

For contrived illustration, try solving the tsumego below (Black to kill):

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Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Bc Black to kill
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How many people read out sequences starting with "b" through to "e" as the first move? If not, why not?

[Numsgil]

Aside from the sector line part, which I don't use myself, I think that all of the items that you mention are covered by good tactical ability.

For example, "knowing when to run and when to die" can be achieved by understanding the outcome of the local situation. When you see the outcome by reading, you can know whether it's a good decision to go down that route.

Then what would you consider strategy to actually be?

I think that what people commonly refer to as strategy is theory that they read in books, which they'll use as heuristics to deal with situations. Go proverbs might be an example of this.

I think that you can get a lot of these heuristics and go proverbs under your belt, and it may help some of your decisions - but I don't think it's a good substitute for reading.

I think that if you focus only on reading, you will not need the heuristics and go proverbs you read in books - you will learn these things yourself from experience.

I think it's important to make this decision, because it is easy to cut back on reading and think, "well, I'll just apply this heuristic". Somebody with sufficient reading will then find out where the heuristic goes wrong and beat you.

I was sort of debating whether I have anything useful to say or if I am just beating a dead horse anymore, but I think I do, and this post seems the most concise and specific of your posts to reply to.

Yes, heuristics are found in go books. Like blindly following tesuji (which are basically heuristics themselves), they aren't a substitute for good reading. However, strictly on their own terms they're actually quite powerful. You can get to at least SDK by mostly following solid heuristics. Most computer go engines being case in point. And when you do read, you want to start with the heuristics anyway, so you have to learn them eventually.

However, I don't think anyone would call heuristic rules "strategy". They are tactics. I think maybe you misunderstood my original post replying to palapiku, as going back and reading it again I think it's possible to read it as me saying that you don't need to read and can just follow heuristics in books. Especially since before that I had linked "Contact Fights" which is 100% heuristics. But that's not what I meant.

What I meant, and mean, is that it's possible to go the exact opposite extreme and learn go from a "top down" standpoint. Understand the top level strategy of what's going on on the board, on the whole board. When you get out played tactically, if you can turn that loss in to a win, for example by building a strong wall in sente facing an open region, your actual loss on the board is minimal, or you actually come out ahead. Your opponent can feel smugly superior as he destroys position after position, shaking his head and thinking "why hasn't this guy resigned yet", only to find himself at a loss for points at the end.

If your equal rated opponent really understands your tactical weakness, because you play him a lot, he might just start unreasonably invading everywhere and it can be difficult to win like that. You do need points somewhere. But usually, if your opponent can read out a death for his stones, he'll assume (even on a subconcious level) that you can too. So really crazy invasions that might work against you still won't get played, and as long as you know how to direct his weak stones around the board effectively you can still probably win half the time. And really, it's possible to stumble into a kill if your opponent underestimates you too far.

With that solid understanding of the top level, you can go back in and learn how to kill weak groups that you just pushed around before, or how to live with tricky invasions. At the end of the day you're not worse off than those that start "bottom up", since to be good you still need to traverse the entire skill tree. And you probably will pick up some reading ability just by osmosis after playing hundreds of games.

And just for full disclosure: I do maybe 20 problems a day on my iPhone through SmartGo, so I'd be lying if I said I won games only through strategy. I do kill groups from time to time. But my tactical ability is certainly many stones weaker than my KGS rank, because I found it easier to spend a few hours reading things on strategy than I did on problems. So study whichever aspect of the game you enjoy, and just watch for a plateau signalling that you need to switch to something else to progress.

[daniel_the_smith]

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Tactically, both a and b are possible. The difference is strategic.

I would say that, "locally" a and b are possible. The difference is the global position. In both cases, I think that a fundamental reliance on reading will get you further than what you read in a book on go theory.

That's exactly the point. Since both are "locally" possible, pure reading will never be able to tell you which one of them is better.

Who says reading can't be global?

[Aphelion]

I disagree with Numsgil's assessment. Strategy and tactics maybe regarded as different ends of a spectrum, but they are not equal partners. Tactics is the building block, they most intimately deal with the basic rules of the game: captures, liberties and life and death. Strategy is used to help us think about situations that are several times removed - but nonetheless derived from - those basic rules.

In this sense, tactics informs strategy, but not the other way round. All strategy can be seen as heuristics. They are rules to help you get ahead when your reading is insufficient. However having a bad tactical base leads to you making poorer strategical decisions because your inherent assumptions on how situations can turn out are wrong.

When I was in China I had the privilege of listening to a teacher explain to his 1d-3d students a new, korean joseki. Apparently this joseki evolved because pros did not like the ladder implications of the standard old joseki. A very much tactical consideration, but it is hugely important to initial strategy and fuseki considerations. I realized right then that the stronger you are, the more you see the board in terms of an integrated fight, rather than local tactical situations somehow connected by strategy. Your strategy can only be that good depending on your tactical and fighting strength.

[Monadology]

I'm not really strong enough to remark myself on the subject matter, but I am curious how those strongly advocating reading as the primary determinant of strength explain the difficulty of creating a strong Go-playing computer, considering that one would expect computers are capable of reading at least an order of magnitude further than any pro (and that's probably a gross underestimate).

Of course, pure global reading with enough brute processing power would render strategy entirely meaningless but computers aren't at that level and humans certainly never will be. So what overrides the reading gap between a powerful computer and a strong human player? Subtractively, wouldn't this supplement account for the several ranks between the strongest human player and the strongest computer? And considering that humans won't ever catch up in reading to a computer doesn't that mean that there is a point at which reading will no longer carry a human player forward?

[Joaz Banbeck]

...
Who says reading can't be global?

The tree-trimmer.

[palapiku]

I'm not really strong enough to remark myself on the subject matter, but I am curious how those strongly advocating reading as the primary determinant of strength explain the difficulty of creating a strong Go-playing computer, considering that one would expect computers are capable of reading at least an order of magnitude further than any pro (and that's probably a gross underestimate).

Reading involves not only considering different variations, but also knowing when to stop, and which variations not to read at all because they're stupid (the technical term for this is "pruning"). Humans are very good at discarding stupid move sequences, and computers are very bad. Since the go board is so big, this is a big problem (unlike Chess, where considering ALL moves many turns ahead is a reality).

"Reading", "tactics", "strategy" are all human-specific terms, and saying "computers are strong at reading" is trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

[hyperpape]

Monadology: the branching factor in Go is terrible, and even single digit kyus can occasionally get into circumstances where we read 15 moves. Of course we don't read multiple variations for each of those moves we rely on intuition, but that's part of what's hard for a computer, and it's considered a part of reading. Something like a hane and connect on the second line--we might not consider a variation, but it's a place where a computer doesn't have the same ability to make shortcuts.

For that reason, the strongest go playing programs are based on Monte-Carlo algorithms. http://senseis.xmp.net/?MonteCarlo

(I see I've typed up the same thing Palapiku wrote while I was composing this. I'd just add that "computers are good at reading" is a perfectly sensible thing to say about the most similar game we have: chess. It just relies on assumptions that don't apply to Go.)