Life In 19x19

Who cares whether the tile is perfect in any language? It's a damn fine book!

One possible translation could be: the progression from amateur to pro thinking is seamless.

But still a highly dubious thought. As the wise Irishman said to the lost tourist who asked the way, "If I were you, sorr, I wouldn't start from here."

Pros start as amateurs, obviously, but seem to be a different kind of amateur from the rest of us. The rest of us are lost tourists in the world of go. But we do enjoy the scenery

RobertJasiek wrote:The book's message is fundamentals themselves AND importance of fundamentals AND motivation AND amateur/pro different thinking AND entertainment. This cannot all be captured in a title. BTW, differences of thinking between amateurs and pros are fluent, especially between strong amateurs and pros, i.e., players with low blunder rates. Differences might be greater between explicit knowledge thinkers versus subconscious-only thinkers - hardly with respect to what they know but rather with respect to whether they can express well what they know.

No title can fully capture the book's content or the title would have to be as long as the book itself, possibly longer.
But one title might make the message more clear than another, or be more representative of the contents. This is what I was talking about. In my view, the original title is more appropriate than the english title. Sorry for the confusion.

I also prefer the original title. I would like to know why the author changed it. I got the sequel, but I haven't had a chance to read it yet. I was first going to reread Amateur and Pro sometime.

Shaddy, with "fluent" as a description for the thinking differences between amateurs and pros I mean that there is no clear cut between amateurs and pros but they share lots of aspects of thinking, although most strong amateurs would be weaker than pros in a few other aspects of thinking. It is not the same aspects missing for all strong amateurs and present for all pros - so my impression of them all (AFAI could witness their thinking expressed) is a fluent transit from the amateurs' domain of thinking to the pros' domain of thinking.

Marcel, yes I mean the German "die Unterschiede sind fließend", and maybe "blurred", "fuzzy" or (daal) "seamless" are better translations.

RobertJasiek wrote:Shaddy, with "fluent" as a description for the thinking differences between amateurs and pros I mean that there is no clear cut between amateurs and pros but they share lots of aspects of thinking, although most strong amateurs would be weaker than pros in a few other aspects of thinking. It is not the same aspects missing for all strong amateurs and present for all pros - so my impression of them all (AFAI could witness their thinking expressed) is a fluent transit from the amateurs' domain of thinking to the pros' domain of thinking.

I am sure that you cannot determine the difference between those strong amateurs, who made the transit into the professional world, and those, who failed just before the turnpike, in terms of “kind of thinking”, or “volume of knowledge”.

This supports John’s assessment below:

John Fairbairn wrote:Pros start as amateurs, obviously, but seem to be a different kind of amateur from the rest of us. The rest of us are lost tourists in the world of go. But we do enjoy the scenery

The decisive difference between “enjoying the scenery”, and “creating the scenery”, is the combination of “attitude / mindset” only, as already mentioned by John:

John Fairbairn wrote:After having read many thousands of pages of Japanese go texts over many years, I have crystallised a thought: the single most important word in go is 態度 (taido). It is common in go texts but is not a technical term.

Its prime dictionary meaning would be 'attitude', but in go 'mindset' is probably better. Both jeromie and Kirby demonstrate here that they understand the meaning and the importance of the word.

Let me give you some further explanations, changing the topic to “The most difficult problem ever created” = Igo Hatsuyôron 120.

I would like to assume that the (few) East-Asian professionals, who had engrossed their mind in our three-amateurs’ elaborations about the problem, were willing to spend some tiny amount of their very valuable time only, because they felt the “aji” of professional attitude that came along with our work.

Matters of “technique / knowledge” were not considered important at all, despite these professionals were so very kind to correct some minor mistakes in our sequences (e.g. related to correct endgame). All these professionals were very aware that our ‘”knowledge” was far, far below theirs, but eventually they were so kind to admit that we had identified several forks on the path to the correct solution, where professional walkers had chosen the wrong direction before.