Life In 19x19

Kuros wrote:tend to get "fuzzy"...

...properties of our brains that are unfortunately just unimprovable?

Kirby wrote:When you're just reading a single move, it's easy to answer the question: Is black alive or dead here?

Kuros' questions are perennial in Go.

As a complete layman in neural science, I have these questions:

- What was your age when you started Go? ( By "you" I mean for every Go person. )
From anecdotal evidence and my personal experiences (myself, and other friends),
I know the starting age makes a huge difference in terms of reading in Go (visualizing stones in the brain).

- How does age correlate to reading ability ? ( Not binary; a continuum ? )
In general, the younger the better. But, How, exactly ? ( Continuum ? )

- Related: Is there some significant change in reading ability around the Starting age 10-15 ? ( Continuum ? )

- Related: Is there some significant change in reading ability around the Starting age 20-25 ? ( Continuum ? )

- Related: Is there some significant change in reading ability around the Starting age 30 ? ( Continuum ? )

- What exactly does the brain see when one reads in Go ? ( Continuum ? )
I'm not interesting in the philosophical question (Is my 'red' the same as your 'red' ?);
I'm interested in the actual, physiological, and neural differences when different brains read in Go.
This means actual research.

Kirby wrote:remember that label.

Kirby wrote:for each candidate move, you have a definite result.

Kirby wrote:using the result from the last step.

I suspect there's some cross-talking (non-overlap areas) between Kuros' questions and Kirby's perspective.
I think the questions above may shed some light.

Take an extreme (contrived?) example:
Take a person, Bob, with "normal" color vision.
Take another person, Joe, with "severe" color vision impairment.
( Already, I don't know the neural science behind color visions.
The point is that reading stones in the brain could be a physiological, neural question,
and not a psychological, thought-process, managerial/organizational problem. )

We have a box of balls, either red, blue, yellow, or green.
We take a random ball from the box, and ask Bob and Joe what color is it.
This is a sample result, for the same ball for each person:
Bob: Red. Joe: I don't know.
Bob: Blue. Joe: I don't know.
Bob: Yellow. Joe: I don't know.
Bob: Green. Joe: I don't know.
Bob: Red. Joe: I don't know.
Bob: Green. Joe: I don't know.
...

This is taking Kirby's "process steps" to an extreme:
at each step, unlike Kirby's idea of "definite", "stored result", and "label",
what Joe sees for each step is "Unclear/fuzzy".

Back to Kirby's step 1, to read a single move ahead: is it alive or dead ?
I suspect the answer, unlike what Kirby suggests, is not necessarily binary.
I suspect for some people, they can "see" the single move more clearly than others.
See the above questions again.

As for the status: is it alive or dead -- well, it's "unclear" --
either B is alive, B is dead, W is alive, W is dead, ko (what kind of ko?), or seki.

At each step, as Kuros said the stones are "fuzzy".
I suspect the stones have different degrees of clarity and fuzziness,
depending, once again, on the above questions, and the particular shape.

Questions:

What part(s) of the brain do we use when we read in Go ?

If it turns out that Kuros' questions stem from certain areas of the brain,
whereas Kirby's step process involves other, unrelated areas of the brain for managerial/organizational problem solving,
then we have an interesting situation (cross-talking, non-overlapping of discussion).

( Another (contrived?) example: why is it so difficult or even impossible for certain people
to reduce or completely eliminate their accent with a non-native language if they started learning
that non-native language after a certain age ? Is it because certain neurons which were never activated
have died ( during some age range ) and they are simply missing for the new non-native language ?
The non-native speaker simply cannot, physiologically, hear certain non-native tones.

If reading in Go has any similarity to color vision or accents in non-native languages,
then it seems any managerial or organizational process is not very helpful,
because at each step, the answer is "I don't know -- I cannot see colors; or I cannot hear this tone." )

Research needed, please.

@EdLee:
I'm not sure what you are implying by noting my use of words like "definite" and "result"; my intention isn't to say that someone can read any position with definite clarity or anything.

What I'm trying to express is that a complex reading problem can be broken up into smaller pieces that are easier to manage. At the "leaf" of the game tree, problems are much easier. So if you can come to intermediate conclusions about those leaves, you can in a way, propagate the result of these smaller subtrees up the tree so that you have a simpler problem to deal with.

Reading can certainly be difficult, and sometimes a definite answer is difficult to find. Nonetheless, we can make it simpler by breaking the problem up in an organized manner.

There was a small text "editing..." at the start of my post --
I was still in the middle of a massive editing session when you replied.

If we take my (contrived?) examples above,
if you have "normal" color vision, and Joe has "severe" color vision impairment;
or, if you are a native English speaker (who can correctly pronounce the English consonants L and R),
and Joe is a non-naive English speaker who started learning English at age 40,
it seems any organizational stepping process may not help him (at all) ?
Because at each step, what he experiences is "Unclear -- I don't see colors.";
or, "I cannot hear the difference between the English L, the English R, and my native closest consonant -- all three sound identical to me."

I suspect color vision (impairment) and accents in non-native languages
are probably both not binary but a continuum.
I suspect the same for reading in Go.

Interesting. I didn't really see the problem this way, because my view is that something "fuzzy" can become "less fuzzy" if you drill down far enough. That's what I'm trying to get at in saying that you can break a complicated problem down into manageable pieces. Maybe the problem from the starting point is fuzzy and unclear. But I suspect, with enough drilling down, you can solve it.

So to your example about ball colors, I'd suspect the conversation could go like this:

"What color is this ball?"
Bob: Red. Joe: I don't know. Bob: Well, does the color of this ball more closely match that of this (red) piece of paper, or this (blue) piece of paper?

Maybe Joe isn't that familiar with how colors work, and by drilling down on the question, perhaps Joe can eventually get to a solution. The exception to this would be, of course, if Joe is totally blind to colors and has no way of answering the question, "What color is this?", even after dissecting the question.

I refuse to believe that this is the case with Go. Simplicity is part of the beauty of the game. If you break a complicated situation down enough, you eventually get to a simpler problem.