Could you tell me again how T. Mark Hall gained two stones by "merely" transcribing them [=Go Seigen's games]?
It's true enough, and he devised the phrase himself. But it's rather more nuanced than it seems.
Details of figures are now a bit fuzzy in my brain, but the background is that Mark started transcribing games of people like Takemiya in the days when floppy discs really were this large floppy squares. They had a limit of about 300 games, as I recall. And I think the early sets were in Ishi format, not sgf. But Mark couldn't read the names and metadata on games in the Japanese magazines and books he had brought with him from his stay as a Foreign Office official in Japan. That's where I came in.
He changed jobs within the Foreign Office, partly as a result of his experience with these floppy discs. He became an installer of computer systems, and trainer, which meant that instead of being posted to one country, he was sent for short periods to very many counties (I think he notched up over 90 countries). He managed to arrange it so that he had many visits to Japan, China and Korea, and he would come back laden with go books. Almost every one was a collection of game records but he didn't know what he had. Again that's where I came in. I worked within the House of Commons and Downing Street, and he would return from each CJK trip by coming straight to my office with his huge bag of books. I then told him what he had bought. He would go off and transcribe the games and I would top and tail them with all the metadata. It wasn't quite as straightforward as it sounds, as I would often have to write to pros in Japan to ask which of the 20 possible ways their names, or names of their teacher, could be read was correct. For example, even Hayashi Yutaka, the editor of Kido and the famous Go Encyclopaedia used the names Kogishi Soji and Ogishi Soji in different editions of his encyclopaedia. I write to a pupil of K/O Soji, Masubuchi Tatsuko, and asked her. She confirmed it was Kogishi.
Mark and I would also go on CJK book-shopping trips together, and we complemented each other perfectly. He bought the books with all the game records and I bought books with all text. That gave me lots more info about names plus data about tournaments or incidents that I could incorporate in the Ishi or sgf files Mark produced. That went on for a very long time, and Mark personally produced close to 40,000 sgf files before he died. These still pop up in what we might say are the unlikeliest of places, e.g. L19, even with the same original mistakes
But the Go Seigen files occupied a special place in that colossal output. They came in very early because Mark had found a 4-volume set of GSG complete games in Korea and bought every copy in the shop (you didn't have to worry about luggage if you had access to a diplomatic bag!). Apart from one set for me, that meant he had a few copies to sell. They were snapped up almost instantly. But for him it then became almost an obsession to transcribe all those games, and so this became the first set of one-player games that Mark did in that obsessive, focused, non-stop way. And it took him from 2-dan to 4-dan and to becoming British Open Champion.
I personally don't think that the fact that the games featured Go Seigen was a direct factor. It was the intense effort that counted most. I'm pretty sure he thought the same. We remained obsessives about collecting GSG games that were not in the "Collected Games" and certainly added very many over the years (close to 100?, but Mark went on to do complete sgf collections of the likes of Takagawa and Kitani and never got quite the same boost to his performance (though he did get some). I never got any boost at all because, while I did do a lot of transcriptions myself (for example, those in Chinese numerals, which Mark found slowed him down too much), I never did them in his obsessive, focused way. In fact, whenever I did transcriptions I found they made me fall sound asleep at my desk. I had the same experience again earlier this week!
As to what Mark got out of these transcriptions, it was an ability to predict candidate moves quickly. In other words, he was building up his intuition. That meant he could look at a dense diagram and laser in to the right area of the board for the next move (right area but not necessarily right move) to transcribe. The result was that he went down from about an hour a game to more like 20 minutes. For much of his go career, he was transcribing 5 or 6 games daily. This ability to spot candidate moves made him excel at lightning play (I think it's fair to say he was about 6-dan in that format). But he became a lightning player even in longer formats where opponents had time to think, and that blemished his overall results. Still, I think he was really 5-dan before he became ill. He was also able to talk very knowledgeably about games without having read any commentaries. I know he was accurate, because a common scenario is that I would write a book and he would be the main proof-reader. I had close knowledge of the pro commentaries, but he didn't (until he finished the book) but he would say things about the games that married very, very well with what the pros said.
I'm not at all sure where he got that insight from. It may be that many of my books were on GSG's ten-game matches, and he had transcribed those games so intently in a crucial part of his go career that they were seared into his brain. It wasn't all pure science, though. There were some tricks. For example, he soon learned that if he couldn't find a GSG move quickly on a diagram, look for a weird contact play. It's amazing how often that works. It was also him who noticed how often GSG seemed to say "White 8 is bad." We would joke that that was where the opponent first went wrong and Go had already won. It was also that that led, by a circuitous route, to my theory of Go Seigen Groups. It was meant, too, as a joke but it seemed to end up making sense. (It has also ended up tying in with the 10-9 point theories of ancient China go, which of course influenced Go himself.)
Another element Mark learned is something a bit to tenuous to label but it had to to do with following the flow of a game. He noticed this because whenever he transcribed games by an amateur, or even weak pros, he found transcription time would double from about 20 to 40 minutes, because he couldn't predict the bad moves played by the weak players. What an asset that was!
I think he could have made very significant progress even if he had started by transcribing, say, Kitani instead of GSG, but that leaves out the passion he felt about GSG. That passion gave him the drive to put in the intense work. A lack of passion for other players may also explain why he didn't make huge progress after his huge initial spurt. although I think the law of diminishing returns explains that at least as well. He also was resolute in not studying commentaries in books or doing L&D problems. He'd dome all that in his youth, and to do it in his later career would just take away time from transcribing games, he said.
Pros recommend playing over pro games on a real board more than any other form of practice. This is a form of transcription. But from the many pro biographies I've read, that only really works if you are obsessive about it as Mark was.
This December will see the 10th anniversary of his death, incidentally. I believe the BGA (in the new London Go Centre he largely funded) runs a memorial tournament and it is very appropriately a lightning tournament.
Moyo is potential territory and the invader dies or half of the moyo persists as territory, or the invader gets small life with thickness all around. That's my intuition about moyos. This result is a new kind of positive outcome. Well, I must have seen it before but not articulated it so clearly for myself.
I think this is accurate enough (and very useful), but you may care to note that Matthew Macfadyen used the term "virtual territory" rather than "potential territory" for the same ideas, and I think he was the first to express the concept in English (someone had to take the trouble: for reasons I won't go into, there's not much need to have the concept spelt out in quite the same way in Japanese because the word 'moyo' itself alerts you well enough to the inherent vagueness). I suspect Matthew chose 'virtual' because at the time it was becoming a bit of a buzz-word in computer circles. But FWIW I think, as a native speaker, that it does indeed have a slight edge over 'potential'. The specific portion of the concept that encompasses the idea of 'entice the opponent to invade your moyo and let him live small' came from a lecture I gave at the old London Go Centre. It opened a lot of eyes very wide. No credit to me. I basically just read out what Takemiya said in a go magazine. In general, I think Matthew is the one to credit. He was/is a lot more active (and talented) than most strong players in sharing his insights into go.
meant a failure for Black, since White's reduction of the moyo was successful and Black played a 2nd line gote. Takagawa and KataGo look at it differently. I can't speak for them but the move and KataGo's positive evaluation tell me that Black has two big strong groups now on each side, while White's group is still afloat. That's a positive outcome of a moyo I would not expect at first. Moyo is potential territory and the invader dies or half of the moyo persists as territory, or the invader gets small life with thickness all around. That's my intuition about moyos. This result is a new kind of positive outcome. Well, I must have seen it before but not articulated it so clearly for myself.
or a) and now white's group is also strengthened. Note that this is more than slightly better for black than the game according to KataGo; an entire whole point better! That is hard to ignore when there is nothing happening in the game. 