John Fairbairn wrote:Although I can list a very large number of potentially relevant strategic elements consciously, I believe that conscious thought is not likely to be useful in such positions in actual games. Its main use would be in study, where it would help bolster my intuition. Although I am exaggerating, I think it's reasonable, for amateurs at least, to say that actual play is about intuition + reading and study is about conscious thought + examples.
While I know you're using a bit of hyperbole, I think you're falling into the same trap as Robert. He has spent most of his go playing career attempting to articulate rational principles for play, so he probably relies on conscious thought much more than the average 5-dan. You've spent a tremendous amount of time looking at professional games, so your intuition for a good move is probably far more developed than most amateurs' feel for the game. You're each at an extreme of the reasoning / intuition spectrum, so I suspect that the thought processes of most people will fall somewhere in between. I don't think that studying conscious principles (even for use in a game situation) or developing one's intuition are mutually exclusive, though I suspect each of us leans toward one or the other.
Incidentally, I'm interested to see if the development of a professional system in Western Go might lead to people who perform at a similarly high level as Asian professionals but arrive there via a different path. We often talk about how professionals approach / study the game, but is their approach descriptive (this is how they happen to do it) or prescriptive (this is what must be done to reach that level)? Is there one path to good Go or are there many paths?
There is interesting research in the field of cognitive psychology that can shed a little more light on this discussion. Some of this has been mentioned elsewhere on this forum, but I think there are some interesting connections to daal's initial question. The article Visual Span in Expert Chess Players: Evidence From Eye Movements provides further evidence for "chunking" (which John has discussed at length elsewhere). This quote was representative of the initial hypothesis they were testing:
The master is thought to use recognizable configurations of pieces, chunks, and templates as indices to long-term memory structures that, in association with a problem-solving context, trigger the generation of plausible moves for use by a search mechanism. Search is thereby constrained to the more promising branches in the space of possible moves from a given chess position.
They authors found eye movements to support this hypothesis, and in fact strengthen it: "Our study extends these findings by showing that experts have an advantage in extracting perceptual information in an individual fixation."
I think this is a big part of what we are talking about when we discuss "intuition" in go: at a fundamental, perceptual level expert players do not see the board in the same way as beginners. This is obviously trained from a lot of inputs and is distinct from understanding principles of the game. In fact, humans are generally bad at giving a rational description of how their perception works. So our decisions about a board state involve two steps: perceptual encoding and rational use of those perceived "chunks".
So why is our intuition wrong? Part of the answer is not enough exposure, as several have already mentioned. (And John has ably demonstrated the value of LOTS of exposure to good go.) But I think there is another issue, too: intuition pumps. Once we've extracted information from a problem description (or go board state) our brains can generate intuitive answers and / or approaches to finding a solution. But sometimes there are elements of the problem (or board) that can lead us to an incorrect intuitive response, and once we've started down that path it is difficult to see the problem differently.
I think this is part of what happens to us amateurs: we extract the wrong perceptual information from the scene, or the combination of features make us entertain the wrong type of move. The go board acts as an "intuition pump" that blinds us to the right move, even if the principles that would lead us to select that move are resident in memory. I think there are at least two solutions to this problem. The first to try to suppress the intuitive response in order to make sure that we can apply the rational principles without bias. This seems to be the approach that Robert advocates, and why he is able to insist that intuition does not play a large role in his play. The second approach would be to train our intuition to more often select the right move (or type of move). This method takes advantage of our mind's ability to generate a lot of information about the scene at a perceptual level. I don't think either approach is necessarily wrong, and I expect that perception and rational assessment will develop in tandem for most players.