Some parts I found especially interesting. It's not always eye-opening but personally I had similiar opinions to the following themes and I'm glad that they can now be found in a scientific paper : )
On intelligence and Go:
3.1 “Individual differences in cognitive capacity” - last paragraph wrote:In other words, the biology of an individual’s brains has a limited importance in the development of expertise. It is more important, for example, how interested the individual is in their domain, or how much time the individual ends up using practising.
On the ten-year-rule:
3.2 “The development of constantly-utilized skills into expertise” - first paragraph wrote:[...] that, by being “exposed” to a ten years’ worth of experience, everybody could become an expert. Later studies have consistently showed that when an individual reaches an acceptable level of skill for themselves, additional experience will then yield marginal utility [13, pp. 691]. It is for example easy to find amateur Go players who have played tens of thousands of games, but still play at an intermediate level—and on the other hand, there also exist fast-improving players, who may be called skilful after they have only played a thousand games or so. It is clear that mere time expended in a domain is a bad measure of skill, as the utility of time is not always same.
On memorising professional records and solving Go problems:
3.2 “The development of constantly-utilized skills into expertise” - last paragraph wrote:In Japanese Go schools, as well, deliberate practise is used. Common training consists of the playing of games, their post-analysis, reading of theory books, rote learning of played professional games, and solving of Go problems. Of these, the two last are not very obvious methods of training, but they are given a notably big weight. Rote learning of played professional games is thought to develop a player’s intuition: it increases the number of familiar shapes and sequences contained in a player’s memory, the shapes and sequences then becoming available to call out from the memory for use when needed. Like so, rote learning is effective at improving a player’s global intuition of the Go board, while go problems—meaning situations in which a player is to make a group of Go stones to live or to die in a restricted space—improve a player’s intuition for local situations. The teacher of a Go school often fine-tunes the learning material, depending on the student’s phase of learning.
On pattern recognition:
4.2 Expertise and short-term memory - last paragraph wrote:[...] it has been estimated that an expert of chess or Go should know some 10000-100000 different game patterns [22, pp. 5].
Why professional Go players are experts:
5.1 Measuring expertise in chess and Go - fourth paragraph wrote:In the context of go, in Asia and the United States there are certified professional players who are qualified in annually held professional examinations. Because the players participating in the examinations on average come from the very top spectrum of amateur players, and because very few players end up qualifying to become professionals, it is justified to call professional go players experts in the game.
How to practice:
5.3 On reaching the skills required for expertise in chess and Go - second paragraph wrote:Deliberate practise is generally accepted and reliably proven to be one of the most efficient means to learn new skills [13, pp. 601]. As was mentioned in Chapter 3, simple additional experience may not help at all at learning new skills or at improving one’s playing level. In deliberate practise, it is essential that the practise be done in a concentrated mind set, that it be regulated and monitored, and that it involves immediate feedback of the individual’s performance. The feedback may come from a third-party evaluator, or the practiser may provide it for himself, for example by comparing one’s performance to expert performance in a similar situation. In deliberate practise, an individual is given goals and aims that are above his current performance level, and while the individual strives for these, failures and lower-level performance may result on a shorter time span. Individuals striving for expertise may, indeed, see these failures as opportunities to improve. [13, pp 601]. In other words, the crucial factor becomes that the individual actively and constantly strives to improve, and doesn’t end up merely “accumulating more experience” [9, pp. 163]. Quantity doesn’t make up for quality at deliberate practise, either: it has been noted that even when looking at very different domains of expertise, experts usually train for only 4-5 hours a day on average. Too much practise may, depending on the domain, lead to practise injuries or so-called “burnout”. [13, pp. 699].
The advantages of having a teacher:
5.3 On reaching the skills required for expertise in chess and Go - last paragraph wrote:Getting instruction from a current expert is definitely the easier solution for the student, as by so doing the student delegates the preparation of study material to the expert, and can themselves fully concentrate on the actual practise. With this procedure, the student has the additional advantage of having a third party who will actively monitor their improvement, and give additional guidance and coaching if necessary.
