Life In 19x19

Most of us that are not pursuing a professional career in Go have only so much time during the day to cultivate Go skills. Still, it takes a while for one to see any appreciable improvement in the same, so an effective training régime is desirable.

(And at the risk of looking like some cheap philosopher...) an infant must nurse at mother's breast, since it has no teeth. A toddler has to eat soft foods, since her teeth are not yet fully developed.

I work from the assumption that a toddler has to practice constantly to master human speech, but at the same time she absorbs a lot through attentive observation of her environment. Overtime, constant imitation, practice, and refinement allow the toddler to understand some basic vocabulary and know how to use it. Eventually the toddler grows into a child and has a fairly good command of human speech.

With that analogy in mind, I surmise that the novice learning Go for the first time should just imitate the moves in pro games to gain experience. Of course, let's remember these are plays made by seasoned experts and it will take many lost games and erroneous plays to make progress, but the novice should strive constantly to play the right way. Once the novice has gained experience in Go, puzzles can be used to weed out the worst playing habits, beginning with tesuji and life & death ones. Through this process of constant practice and refinement, the novice can make steady progress toward shodan.

In a nutshell, by the time a toddler begins to talk, she has absorbed thousands of hours of conversation. Perhaps if the Go novice sticks just to replaying pro games and playing actual games against opponents for the first few months, a solid foundation for subsequent study and improvement can be laid.

Knotwilg wrote:When I started playing table tennis competitively 1,5 years ago, I also watched a lot of pro movies. It's fun, it's spectacular, it's inspiring.

A while ago a strong player watched me and said: "your serve looks like you copied it from a video or something, but there's not much going on". I had copied the body weight shift, some arm motion and a lot was going on in my head that didn't transfer into the mechanics (loads of spin - NOT, astute disguise - NOT).

It turned out there were some aspects that I was not copying at all: backswing, keeping the bat flat, wrist action, keeping the contact thin, using the tip of the bat for extra momentum ... all details of serve action that I either had not noticed, or thought I executed but didn't.

I needed to go back and train these aspects first and each one in isolation. Now my serves didn't look like professional serves at all. Now I was really training.

Nice analogy.

We don't learn to speak by mere imitation and we certainly don't subject our toddlers to Winston Churchill speeches alone. We say "ball" "baaalllll".

Knotwilg wrote:We don't learn to speak by mere imitation

Mostly we do.

and we certainly don't subject our toddlers to Winston Churchill speeches alone.

No, but they hear correct (pro level) speech all the time.

We say "ball" "baaalllll".

Sure, but most vocabulary is picked up, and nearly all grammar is. Picking up grammar is a remarkable achievement that nearly every child accomplishes before school age.

Yes, we correct children's speech, but we also reward some mistakes because they are cute.

Bill Spight wrote:

Knotwilg wrote:We don't learn to speak by mere imitation

Mostly we do.

and we certainly don't subject our toddlers to Winston Churchill speeches alone.

No, but they hear correct (pro level) speech all the time.

We say "ball" "baaalllll".

Sure, but most vocabulary is picked up, and nearly all grammar is. Picking up grammar is a remarkable achievement that nearly every child accomplishes before school age.

Yes, we correct children's speech, but we also reward some mistakes because they are cute.

There are also numerous examples of adults correcting children's speech, only to have them reproduce the incorrect version because it fits their understanding of the language at the time. It's certainly decently documented that children progress from using "went" to using "goed" before going back to "went", as their understanding of English develops.

Furthermore, there is some evidence that correction in adult language learners can be counterproductive: http://www.hss.nthu.edu.tw/~fl/faculty/John/What%27s%20Wrong%20with%20Oral%20Grammar%20Correction%201999.htm. I would be completely unsurprised to learn that this is the case in go as well. I, for example, may have a general sense of "this move looks bad", but that doesn't mean that I fully understand the situation that I attempt to explain to someone, and I have certainly told people a move was good or bad and been dead wrong before. It's also very easy to focus on "oh, I need to play this move here" or "this is the joseki move, so I have to play it" without the understanding necessary to make those moves good moves, or applying them in the wrong context.

To my mind, the most important thing in playing go is the ability to generate and prune candidate moves. You need to develop an innate sense of which moves could be interesting, and which are not, in order to confine your search space to something managable. Similarly, you also need that to expand it to include the sharpest moves, as you will never be able to read if they work when they don't occur to you in the first place. I don't know how many lectures I've seen, or books I've read, where the answer in a particular position seems so counterintuitive to my level that not only do I fail to consider it, but I don't really understand the explanation either and can't implement it in my own games. You can tell me "no, this is good!" all you want, but there's no way for me to apply it because my understanding isn't there yet.

As an example, most beginners learn the basic 3-3 invasion under a 4-4 stone pretty early on, and once they do, you start to see it all the time in their games. It takes a long time to go from that to the understanding that this sequence is not actually good except in fairly specific circumstances, and it's not something you can just tell someone and expect them to be able to implement well. They may listen to you and not do it when they think they should, but then someone will do it to them and they'll handle the result poorly, and it's back to square one. I would go so far as to say that at certain levels, the immediate 3-3 invasion is right, and it continues to be right until a player is strong enough to use the thickness created from the 4-4 stone somewhat effectively. Once they reach that point, their 3-3 invasion timing will become much more nuanced and balanced, and they will no longer fear its early deployment against them.

I think the only way to get to this point is with experience, both your own games and that which you acquire vicariously through the games of others.

We don't learn to speak by mere imitation and we certainly don't subject our toddlers to Winston Churchill speeches alone.

'Imitation' in this context does not mean simple mimicry but is a shorthand for a complex process of exposure to as vast an array of stimuli as possible. We leave the subconscious brain to work out all the most useful connections, and the more we expose it to, the more useful its networks become. We can guide that process a little by rewards and comments, so that the end result is that the child or pupil ends up doing more or less what we do. It has ended up in that sense as imitation, but imitation of actions along the way has not necessarily played a huge role in how we got to that situation.

In go, if you do, say, 100 tsumego problems a day, that sounds impressive, but you are not actually giving your subconscious brain much to work on. You'll end up as a one-trick pony. By looking at lots of pro games, with ideally other aspects of go also in the mix, you are giving your subconscious plenty of compost to turn into bio-fuel.

During that process (which doesn't apply in the same way to every activity, of course), trying to understand something is an often delusional ego-trip. You isolate A and B, have a think and come up with C. You may think you have discovered something, but the odds are that your subconscious brain has already discovered that and is just allowing you a cheap thrill - your own "discovery" is no more than a surface manifestation of that. In language, grammar rules are usually little more than such post-facto descriptions of innate processes.

To improve at go it seems better to feed your subconscious than to feed your ego.

I'm relatively new, and I have enjoyed replaying Pro games quite a bit. I even memorized one right when I started. I consider pro games part of the reason I jumped to 9 kyu in 2 months. I reserve the right to be wrong about that. I was also doing 200-500 super-simple problems a day.

Of course, I've now been stuck at 9 kyu for 2 months, so YMMV, my mileage is obviously varying as well.

I think it's about you. If you enjoy replaying pro games, you will do it, and you will learn something from it (joseki, board positions, a few basic shapes). If you don't enjoy replaying pro games, you're gonna suffer all the way through it and hate every minute -- why do that to yourself? Make learning go fun.

John Fairbairn wrote:In go, if you do, say, 100 tsumego problems a day, that sounds impressive, but you are not actually giving your subconscious brain much to work on. You'll end up as a one-trick pony. By looking at lots of pro games, with ideally other aspects of go also in the mix, you are giving your subconscious plenty of compost to turn into bio-fuel.

I never thought of it that way before

During that process (which doesn't apply in the same way to every activity, of course), trying to understand something is an often delusional ego-trip. You isolate A and B, have a think and come up with C. You may think you have discovered something, but the odds are that your subconscious brain has already discovered that and is just allowing you a cheap thrill - your own "discovery" is no more than a surface manifestation of that.

So, in other words, the "understanding" happens on its own? Never thought of it that way. Just now that reminded me of the meaning of the Sino-Japanese word 暗記 (anki). "Recording in darkness".

I often compare data and information to food and a person's cognitive ability to an intestine. Some people's intestines are rather narrow, so they can only take in a few tidbits and highly digestible ones at that. Others have wide intestines and can assimilate a lot in a short amount of time.

In language, grammar rules are usually little more than such post-facto descriptions of innate processes.

One can say that a grammar is a description of word utilization patterns in a language, produced after exhaustive sifting and analysis by linguists.

To improve at go it seems better to feed your subconscious than to feed your ego.

Yesss

Of course, ego has little effect on improvement, and subconscious learning has a greater effect. However, John associates "ego" with "understanding", and this is where it becomes absolutely wrong. These two are very different things. In particular, understanding has an extremely much greater effect on improvement than subconscious learning without understanding. Replaying (pro) games affects both understanding and subconscious learning and so, without further explanation, it is unclear which, if either, might benefit more from it.

However, John associates "ego" with "understanding", and this is where it becomes absolutely wrong. These two are very different things. In particular, understanding has an extremely much greater effect on improvement than subconscious learning without understanding.

Both of us are DDKs when it comes to the neuro-sciences, so of course this is like the famous battle on the horns of Zhuang Zi's snail. But Zhuang Zi was himself no more than an observer with a questioning mind, so I think we can prattle on...

I repeat that I don't believe (the delusion of) understanding has any real effect on improvement. All of the improvement work has already been done by your subconscious through the intensive work you have put in while trying to understand. Furthermore, the improvement effect is richer in terms of quality and quantity than you realise. Your "understanding" is only a snapshot of what your subconscious has already worked out for you. Note that I am not denying that RJ's work has led to an improvement in his play. I am saying it is down to quantity of work. I am also saying that he has improved in more ways than he has realised, because his subconscious creates networks of understanding that far surpass his impression of what he has understood.

I further maintain that this "understanding" will contribute very little to his own future improvement. His future improvement will again depend almost solely on how much further time he invests, and on the nature of whatever compost he chooses to feed to the soil of his subconscious.

This is not to say that this "understanding", however limited, has no value. The value is more likely to be for others. For we are in charge of our subconscious to the extent that we make choices as to how much and what sort of compost we feed it. Guidance from someone who is already stronger is likely to direct those choices effectively. In other words, "understanding" makes RJ a better teacher of someone else, not a better player. To me, it then seems to follow that a Japanese 9-dan is able to provide more effective direction than a European 5-dan amateur. The vaguer statements of the former, to which RJ objects, seem to be no bar, and may even be an advantage. To help someone improve, you don't teach your discovery that 2+2 = 4 and declare success when he has memorised the formula. You show him examples of 2+2 = 4 and 3+3=6 and so on, and let his brain work out for itself the wider and more useful concept of addition. If you allow the brain enough time and exposure to other and more difficult examples, you may even find, quite unbeknownst to you, that it has also worked out subtraction and maybe even the beginnings of multiplication. Then one day someone will talk to you about multiplication and you will suddenly think you've just understood it. The Beast Within makes a wry smile: "There egoes again!"

After reading the posts on this thread, I surmise it might be easier for me to replay pro games and play actual games initially, since I've not any extensive experience playing baduk. At least I can say I find it more enjoyable just to replay pro games and play actual games, with only some time being dedicated to puzzles. I may have to dedicate a bit more time to puzzles and theory books as I get stronger, though. Of course I don't see myself become pro or even very strong amateur, so I'll have to aim for 3D or 5D.

It's regrettable that I can't have 8-10 hours to myself to study and practice baduk. Then again, I don't live in East Asia