Life In 19x19

Aidoneus: I am a happy EasyGo user (and I used its SRS abilities, it's pretty good), but I also had Anki (I got it 5 years ago just to support its developer) and I wanted problems only (no solutions, no clicking) so I decided to use Anki for it. Some scripting chops and you can create problems from images in no time.

Edit: also, Anki syncs across devices, so I can do my tsumego/language or whatever learning with any device I'm using at the moment.

Oren: mildly subtle. The images I used were generated from edited versions of tasuki's TeX sources (to have 1 problem per page and such) and the other version goes directly from "original" SGF to image (via my tweaks to sgftools.) So, in v1 I have an extra step between the SGF and the image that I don't control... Also, they look much, much uglier (ImageMagick is not brilliant when going from PDF to JPG) so I'd rather post just the beautiful ones... But would need to find them again, etc, etc

RBerenguel wrote:

Elom wrote:Heh, well of course, any serious athelete in any discipline almost always uses a combination of different types of training, you're correct but I guess my explanation was slightly off, as you have pointed out (thanks ).

Maybe what I was trying to say was that the aspects of running, weather long distance or short, are identical- in theory. But what actually happens is that some elements of running are more or less pronounced or important depending on the distance, to the point where some elements nearly dissapear and are negligable

While this is less extreme in Go, the following points remain true:

For obvious reasons, you need to need to read deep. If you don't know why deep reading is important, let's just say you have a lot to learn . However, breadth is also very important. Looking at many different possiblities, like in the openening, the broad reader can quickly make pisitonal judge because reading won't get in the way. Think of it like this: let's say someone is tasked with the challenge of remembering a number sequence-- 1234123512361237. Easy, right? This applies to extremely pure versions of deep reading, like one-way-streets or ladders. There is a pattern. A rule. Less pure and more close to most reading situations is 1734193513361137. Now there is an element if randomness. Here's a sequence half the length-- 07563581. It's more tricky! what just happened there!

Well, it's obvious.

The top pros read deep. The top pros read wide. The top pros read accurately. The top pros read quickly.

When people reccomend doing lots of problems really quickly, it's not to train depth, but speed, accuracy and decisiveness. Espeially useful in a byo-yomi situation where you do not have the luxury to look at every possible *and* spend as much time as you like while doing so. But what if you're in the title match for the Kisei, and ended up in a really bad position? I'm sorry, but no matter if had all day to think-- I mean literally-- not being able to read deep enough is not being able to read deep enough.

What I've found is similar... but different. And kind of akin to sprinters/marathoners. A go game is essentially a really long session of very very easy reading exercises, intersped with complicated/very complicated/impossible problems. A relatively good training (in the sense the subjectively, I've felt my gameplay much, much sharper than with any other kind of training) is long sessions of very (or relatively very) easy tsumego. The other aspect is being constant (which also happened in these sessions because they spanned several days.) Hence my current (and former, before I stopped in August, you can read about it in my study log) is doing just (this has been changing and increasing during time, but essentially) Cho elementary L&D problems, day in and day out (using Anki to spread them out in a sane way.) Basically, each day going for a run, no matter if it is long (if I have time I pick any of the many tsumego books I have, or use NGA tsumego assignments), short (just the Anki session.) Of course, this needs tweaking (adding more problems, increasingly more difficult, fighting the utter boredom of doing many "easy" problems for the first days) and the feeling of "boring chore." All are difficult, but are also part of training focus, so not bad per se.

Yep, it seems to have that effect What I tend to do is set myself a time limil for Relatively Unchallenging Puzzles is to set a very short time limit for each tsumego, trying to read everything in a single moment (HnG derived, I admit) and I can say they're not very boring anymore!

Before I move on to pro games, I need to mention one aspect of solving lotd of easy tsumego quickly-- one function, one benifit completely unrelated to speed-reading training, but in the long run indirectly enhances in-game speed reading and difficult tsumego, to a lesser extent.

Memorisation. Of the basic shapes, tesuji, vital points. Of course, on it's own, this is of little use, but combined with the above-mentioned factors, becomes a deadly weapon. And you know what? I've come to this understanding about looking at the answers, a subject debated amobg even pros...

When doing easy problems, it is important to look at the answers. You are NOT training you're reading depth, so it poses little harm. If you are solving a hard tsumego, please avoid looking at the answer as long as possible until you are sure you have the answer, or can't sole it after a considerable amount of time, or you just choose not to look. The answer usually isn't very important in hard problems, but I like the suspense of finding out if I'm right or wrong. You may also be introduced to new ideas, and besides, if you try you're very best all the time, you really don't have to be concerned with the whole debate.

Finally, you are supposed to be solving the problems at such a speed that it should be difficult for you to get them all correct, meaning it's impossible to have a little peek at the solution due to time constraints.

Elom wrote:When doing easy problems, it is important to look at the answers.

I do not get the point. An "easy" problem means that I see the solution within seconds and am quite sure about it - why looking at the answer then?

On the other hand, if you think you've solved a harder problem but the answer was different, it's important to disprove your own "answer" in order to clearly understand the difference (often it's e. g. a Ko instead of a clean kill or gote vs. sente etc.).

RBerenguel wrote:Btw, for a 1/20 win rate you'd need to be something like... 4d EGF? (since we have a couple EGF 7d here) ballpark number, maybe 3d is enough

Hi Elom, since KGS has a nice graph feature,
would you like to restate your target to something like
"solid KGS 3d by Nov 4, 2019" ?
This way, any forum member or anyone else can easily check on your progress.
(Well, as long as KGS is around. Your "Online playing schedule" says
"Every 500 Years". Does it mean you play very few online games ? )

Related: you have every right to keep all your personal info private.
Only if you'd like to share: what's your age range (in increments of 10 or 20 years) ?
What's your experience background ?
(Example: engineering, business, arts & humanities, math, science, etc. )

Also, there may be pros or near-pro amateur high dans (8 or 9 dans) lurking this forum.
They may even occasionally submit their opinions or move commentaries
via anonymous accounts or other existing accounts.
And a 5% win rate against them in an even game is... non-trivial.

EdLee wrote:

RBerenguel wrote:Btw, for a 1/20 win rate you'd need to be something like... 4d EGF? (since we have a couple EGF 7d here) ballpark number, maybe 3d is enough

Hi Elom, since KGS has a nice graph feature,
would you like to restate your target to something like
"solid KGS 3d by Nov 4, 2019" ?
This way, any forum member or anyone else can easily check on your progress.
(Well, as long as KGS is around. Your "Online playing schedule" says
"Every 500 Years". Does it mean you play very few online games ? )

Related: you have every right to keep all your personal info private.
Only if you'd like to share: what's your age range (in increments of 10 or 20 years) ?
What's your experience background ?
(Example: engineering, business, arts & humanities, math, science, etc. )

Also, there may be pros or near-pro amateur high dans (8 or 9 dans) lurking this forum.
They may even occasionally submit their opinions or move commentaries
via anonymous accounts or other existing accounts.
And a 5% win rate against them in an even game is... non-trivial.

Antti, In-Seong, Alexandre & Svetlana have been here on multiple occasions, so this makes the quest hard already

Krama wrote:

RBerenguel wrote:http://ankisrs.net

I only found intermediate problems.

Where did you find elementary problems?

(I am talking about the finished decks)

I have converted the cho-elementary SGF to an Anki deck (without solutions.) Get it here.

RBerenguel wrote:Aidoneus: I am a happy EasyGo user (and I used its SRS abilities, it's pretty good), but I also had Anki (I got it 5 years ago just to support its developer) and I wanted problems only (no solutions, no clicking) so I decided to use Anki for it. Some scripting chops and you can create problems from images in no time.

Edit: also, Anki syncs across devices, so I can do my tsumego/language or whatever learning with any device I'm using at the moment.

I am new to iOS, so I hadn't paid attention to the thread about EasyGo. For now, I'm trying out the light version but will probably upgrade next payday (along with buying some SmartGo books).

schawipp wrote:

Elom wrote:When doing easy problems, it is important to look at the answers.

I do not get the point. An "easy" problem means that I see the solution within seconds and am quite sure about it - why looking at the answer then?

On the other hand, if you think you've solved a harder problem but the answer was different, it's important to disprove your own "answer" in order to clearly understand the difference (often it's e. g. a Ko instead of a clean kill or gote vs. sente etc.).

Yes for that reason, I personally prefer looking at the answers. When I say easy problems, what I mean are easy given average amount of time, in other words, if medium means 50% one minute time limit, and easy means 90% with the same time limit for each problem, lower the easy problem time limit so much that you only have 50% hit-rate, getting through the problems as fast, and quickly as you can possibly muster. Therefore, you want to see many, many answers that you may figure out in a minute, but not necessarily in 20 seconds. It's all about the subconscious, and while you may think you're learning nothing, in a game situation you'll suddenly surprise your opponent, or moreso, YOURSELF, from reading faster than you thought possible.

Now, I know for some, that disciplining yourself not to check the solutions prematurely is a hard task. Discipline is an important part of becoming good at Go-- or anything, for that matter. Because I don't that Skipping the Solu is an extremely big deal compared to actual reading practise, since harder problems solutions are for more specific shapes than easy problems solutions, Some may choose to start of by not looking at the answers at all until he/she is disciplined enough to begin looking at the answers. But I think that the answer could often expose you to new ideas.

RBerenguel wrote:Antti, In-Seong, Alexandre & Svetlana have been here on multiple occasions, so this makes the quest hard already

Whew! And In-Seong is EGF 8th Dan, isn't he? Considering that EGF 6 fans only muster something like a 10% winning ratio against the EGF 8 Dan ex-insei from Korea, (two stones away from top pro level!), I certainly have an ambitious quest ahead of me!

EdLee wrote:

RBerenguel wrote:Btw, for a 1/20 win rate you'd need to be something like... 4d EGF? (since we have a couple EGF 7d here) ballpark number, maybe 3d is enough

Hi Elom, since KGS has a nice graph feature,
would you like to restate your target to something like
"solid KGS 3d by Nov 4, 2019" ?
This way, any forum member or anyone else can easily check on your progress.
(Well, as long as KGS is around. Your "Online playing schedule" says
"Every 500 Years". Does it mean you play very few online games ? )

Related: you have every right to keep all your personal info private.
Only if you'd like to share: what's your age range (in increments of 10 or 20 years) ?
What's your experience background ?
(Example: engineering, business, arts & humanities, math, science, etc. )

Also, there may be pros or near-pro amateur high dans (8 or 9 dans) lurking this forum.
They may even occasionally submit their opinions or move commentaries
via anonymous accounts or other existing accounts.
And a 5% win rate against them in an even game is... non-trivial.

Continuing From earlier, If we assume that KGS Ranks are approximately two stones weaker the EGF ranks, KGS 7 Dan is the only way to go for me. I think you suggested a good Idea, thanks it'd true that ever since I've started playing, in general, Moscow the time I have not been able to play many games-- not to say that I don't get periods where I am able to play more games, but the first time in my life I played a game with more than 30m main time was in the MK tournament-- over 2.5 years after learning the game. However, these days I've been able to play more, so hopefully I will add some links to the rating graphs and game records of all the servers I've joined.

A generalization by month is completely fine I turn 15 by late November. Surprisingly, it seems that 4ky is a little strong for a 15 year old, but as I've been playing for 3 years (started Oct 2011) my progress has been slow.

Maybe not-so-slow is the progress of my maths, I expect myself to score A's or A *'s in Maths, Chemistry, and Physics next summer I've recently started reading A-level math material. I don't put that down to me being genius or anything like that, unless we say that genius is interest-- I see little difference between taking a mock exam and playing a game of Go or playing a new racing game-- to me, what we call subjects-- let's say mathematics, for example-- is not a "subject" but an "Art, Skill, Discipline" just like playing Go, doing videotapes, walking on a tightrope up a hundred feet while trying not to die. Besides, my English is nowhere near thr level of my maths, and following Lee Hajin 3p's advice, "train you're strongest point and you're weakest point, I tend to do maths and English a tad more-- but you're weakest point keeps changing using that method. And math problems are tsumego, I use the above system. I hope this can tell you my "background" in a career sense


So, it may be youngsters naivety or just plain crazy, but "KGS 7d by November 2019, ~ EGF 5~6 Dan by November 2019". Well, better than pessimism!

IMO, easy problems -- and I may define them differently from you -- are not reading problems. With reading problems arguably the journey is more important than the destination. But with easy problems it is the solution that is important. So why not look?

For maths I've always encouraged my students (when I had) and my friends (when we studied together) to just make very fast runs of problems trying to find the "knot" that needs to be solved. Great training for exams, and also for just "knowing" what the hairiest issue is.

But for go, this has never worked for me. You can only go "that fast" when using paper-bound tsumego, and if you go too fast in digital tsumego, you are very likely to fall prey of shape-clicking. This is why I have problems in Anki: I can't click on them, nor can I see the solution.

Bill Spight wrote:IMO, easy problems -- and I may define them differently from you -- are not reading problems. With reading problems arguably the journey is more important than the destination. But with easy problems it is the solution that is important. So why not look?

I classify Cho Chikun's elementary problems set as easy. It is, I can solve them all (a couple though still get my brain blood flowing.) It's essentially shape-sense at this point "huh, I know this shape, I have read it already 6 times." But I'm finding it makes a deeper mark on my brain *not* having checked the solutions for them. In some cases I have been wrong 5 times, and I've found later (either by my own reading or because the problem appeared in an NGA assignment) and then, realising my folly, the impression I got from my own stupidity was stronger than just failing the problem, even if it was 5 or 6 times in a row, checking the solution afterwards.

RBerenguel wrote:

Bill Spight wrote:IMO, easy problems -- and I may define them differently from you -- are not reading problems. With reading problems arguably the journey is more important than the destination. But with easy problems it is the solution that is important. So why not look?

I classify Cho Chikun's elementary problems set as easy. It is, I can solve them all (a couple though still get my brain blood flowing.) It's essentially shape-sense at this point "huh, I know this shape, I have read it already 6 times." But I'm finding it makes a deeper mark on my brain *not* having checked the solutions for them. In some cases I have been wrong 5 times, and I've found later (either by my own reading or because the problem appeared in an NGA assignment) and then, realising my folly, the impression I got from my own stupidity was stronger than just failing the problem, even if it was 5 or 6 times in a row, checking the solution afterwards.

True. Unfortunately, early errors, particularly if they persist for some time, tend to become permanent. Not that they are not corrected, but they are not forgotten. They are repressed. Thus, they can resurface in times of stress or inattention. (The return of the repressed, as Freudians say. )

I was fortunate in that in my first year of play my weakest opponent was 5 kyu (approximately 4 kyu AGA today, I guess). That means that I did not pick up a lot of bad habits, and most of my errors were quickly punished. In addition, many of them were pointed out in postmortems. Better to avoid folly in the first place.

RBerenguel wrote:You can only go "that fast" when using paper-bound tsumego, and if you go too fast in digital tsumego, you are very likely to fall prey of shape-clicking. This is why I have problems in Anki: I can't click on them, nor can I see the solution.

Important point. If you go so fast that you are relying upon recognizing shapes, you can get the right answer, but to the wrong shape. Oh, it's a shape that is part of the problem, all right, but it leaves out key features. Then, in a real game you may think that you know the right play, but you don't.

Bill Spight wrote:

RBerenguel wrote:

Bill Spight wrote:IMO, easy problems -- and I may define them differently from you -- are not reading problems. With reading problems arguably the journey is more important than the destination. But with easy problems it is the solution that is important. So why not look?

I classify Cho Chikun's elementary problems set as easy. It is, I can solve them all (a couple though still get my brain blood flowing.) It's essentially shape-sense at this point "huh, I know this shape, I have read it already 6 times." But I'm finding it makes a deeper mark on my brain *not* having checked the solutions for them. In some cases I have been wrong 5 times, and I've found later (either by my own reading or because the problem appeared in an NGA assignment) and then, realising my folly, the impression I got from my own stupidity was stronger than just failing the problem, even if it was 5 or 6 times in a row, checking the solution afterwards.

True. Unfortunately, early errors, particularly if they persist for some time, tend to become permanent. Not that they are not corrected, but they are not forgotten. They are repressed. Thus, they can resurface in times of stress or inattention. (The return of the repressed, as Freudians say. )

I was fortunate in that in my first year of play my weakest opponent was 5 kyu (approximately 4 kyu AGA today, I guess). That means that I did not pick up a lot of bad habits, and most of my errors were quickly punished. In addition, many of them were pointed out in postmortems. Better to avoid folly in the first place.

Well, I guess I have the advantage of having played "a lot" and done "a lot" of tsumego. So, what I'm learning now (even if it is used to clean up the basics) is not first instinct any more, so they are not early errors any more, but systematic errors. It's like hitting your finger each time with the hammer