Re: Tami's Way
Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2012 2:14 am
I mentioned some time ago that I started looking at chess literature with a view to learning lessons for go. There is a very large corpus of works there that deal (most often in English) with how to think during a game, how to study, how to prepare etc, and much of this is based on current research into cognition. Quite a lot of the latter has also been rendered into popular books outside of chess, and so all in all there is an awful lot of reading matter available now.
I have only read a small fraction, of course, but everything I have read points in one direction: the methods Tami describes are the fruitful ones, Robert's is sterile (interesting though I have founds his ideas in the past). If others wish to test my conclusions briefly, I would strongly recommend Chess for Zebras by Jonathan Rowson (may be the best go book written in English
- I skipped the chess examples), and on the non-chess side Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel prizewinner Daniel Kahneman explains what is and should be going on in your brain in a very accessible way. Further, I see that a book I recommended in an earlier thread, Move First, Think Later, has just won an award as chess book of the year.
In a nutshell, to become a strong chess/go player, you have to learn to trust your intuition. A more advanced aspect is that you have to learn to treat every position on its merits using intuition then calculation, and not as a pattern you can look up in your brain, nor must you rely on static evaluations.
All of this seems to accord with how Japanese go literature has been presented for decades. To repeat an example I gave before, Shimamura Toshihiro said (in the 1950s) that the way to judge a joseki was not by a formula measuring territory and influence but by what sort of fighting shapes it gave for the fight in each particuar game.
However, there was, I thought, a good example in what Tami wrote of the sort of thing that causes so much frustration for Robert with Japanese literature.
I feel sure that very few people would find the English objectionable. Indeed it seems clear and useful. But there is a word used three times in the Japanese which does not appear once in the Engish. This is 構え (kamae). I latch on to this simply because, in working on Volume 4 of The Games of Honinbo Shuei this month, I included a short digression on this word, which is almost invariably omitted or mutated in English translations. I have done the same myself. Its basic meaning is 'construction' or 'structure' (though 'posture' is an important nuance), but these are ugly words that are often difficult to work into a smooth sentence. However, it is really a basic concept of its own (I won't explain here but the Shuei game shows a telling example) both in the fuseki and (in slightly different form) elsewhere. In one of his books Robert claimed to have invented the concept of 'construction'. As kamae shows, he didn't (and also he limited it more just to the aspect of local shape, I think), but as it hadn't been mentioned before explicitly in English, he can fairly claim to have made a very useful insight on his own, and had he known about the Japanese word he may have reached his goal sooner.
The above example is a poor one to talk about kamae as a concept (and perhaps pseudo-concept is better anyway), but if I give a much more literal and ugly translation, that may show how much of Japanese go thinking can get lost in translation:
"We refer to structures in which there is an extension in both directions from a corner structure, as in Fig. 1, as a double wing. Since it is an extremely good structure, moves which aim at a double wing, or which prevent a double wing by the opponent, are big."
In a not entirely dissimilar vein, in another recent post Robert mentioned the concept of maximising territories at the boundaries. Though I pooh-poohed that as a new discovery, I think it is fair to assert that it is much more difficult for westerners to learn this concept if they insist on thinking of yose as the 'endgame'. If you think of it (more correctly) as 'boundary plays', you are more likely to be a horse that can be led to water.
I have only read a small fraction, of course, but everything I have read points in one direction: the methods Tami describes are the fruitful ones, Robert's is sterile (interesting though I have founds his ideas in the past). If others wish to test my conclusions briefly, I would strongly recommend Chess for Zebras by Jonathan Rowson (may be the best go book written in English
- I skipped the chess examples), and on the non-chess side Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel prizewinner Daniel Kahneman explains what is and should be going on in your brain in a very accessible way. Further, I see that a book I recommended in an earlier thread, Move First, Think Later, has just won an award as chess book of the year.In a nutshell, to become a strong chess/go player, you have to learn to trust your intuition. A more advanced aspect is that you have to learn to treat every position on its merits using intuition then calculation, and not as a pattern you can look up in your brain, nor must you rely on static evaluations.
All of this seems to accord with how Japanese go literature has been presented for decades. To repeat an example I gave before, Shimamura Toshihiro said (in the 1950s) that the way to judge a joseki was not by a formula measuring territory and influence but by what sort of fighting shapes it gave for the fight in each particuar game.
However, there was, I thought, a good example in what Tami wrote of the sort of thing that causes so much frustration for Robert with Japanese literature.
1図のように、隅の構えから両方向にヒラク構えを、両翼といいます。非常に良い構えので、両翼を目指したり、相手の両翼を防ぐ手が大きいです
As in Fig. 1, extensions that add to a corner in both directions is called a "double wing". As it is an extremely good point, aiming at a double wing [of your own] and preventing the opponent`s is a big move.
I feel sure that very few people would find the English objectionable. Indeed it seems clear and useful. But there is a word used three times in the Japanese which does not appear once in the Engish. This is 構え (kamae). I latch on to this simply because, in working on Volume 4 of The Games of Honinbo Shuei this month, I included a short digression on this word, which is almost invariably omitted or mutated in English translations. I have done the same myself. Its basic meaning is 'construction' or 'structure' (though 'posture' is an important nuance), but these are ugly words that are often difficult to work into a smooth sentence. However, it is really a basic concept of its own (I won't explain here but the Shuei game shows a telling example) both in the fuseki and (in slightly different form) elsewhere. In one of his books Robert claimed to have invented the concept of 'construction'. As kamae shows, he didn't (and also he limited it more just to the aspect of local shape, I think), but as it hadn't been mentioned before explicitly in English, he can fairly claim to have made a very useful insight on his own, and had he known about the Japanese word he may have reached his goal sooner.
The above example is a poor one to talk about kamae as a concept (and perhaps pseudo-concept is better anyway), but if I give a much more literal and ugly translation, that may show how much of Japanese go thinking can get lost in translation:
"We refer to structures in which there is an extension in both directions from a corner structure, as in Fig. 1, as a double wing. Since it is an extremely good structure, moves which aim at a double wing, or which prevent a double wing by the opponent, are big."
In a not entirely dissimilar vein, in another recent post Robert mentioned the concept of maximising territories at the boundaries. Though I pooh-poohed that as a new discovery, I think it is fair to assert that it is much more difficult for westerners to learn this concept if they insist on thinking of yose as the 'endgame'. If you think of it (more correctly) as 'boundary plays', you are more likely to be a horse that can be led to water.
