Author: Roy Eassa
Date: 14:10:41 02/13/04
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On February 13, 2004 at 15:46:04, Janosch Zwerensky wrote: > >>But having read several Go books, I think it's fair to say that it's steeped in >>almost-mystical language of "shape" and "thickness" and "influence" and many >>other exotic terms, > >Around a year ago, when I was a beginner at Go, I thought as you do. I thought >that there had to be a more straightforward way to express things when stronger >players tried to explain my mistakes to me and used those terms to do so. >Today, I feel that shape, thickness and influence are quite tangible concepts >with no mysterious touch to them and I use them the same way my teachers did >when I do the teaching with weaker players :). > I never meant to imply that I doubted that those terms referred to real, tangible things. I know they do. What I meant was more that someday an algorithmic approach MAY trump those things, just as in chess Shredder 8 running on a fast PC will win a majority of games against a 2500-rated player who has spent a lifetime learning about weak squares and backward pawns and the like. Or somewhat like Einstein showed that Newton's ideas, though right, weren't all there was. Right now, it's almost as if "shape" and the like were gods, to be worshipped as the ultimate truth. In reality, we know that tactics are all there is, even if those tactics are on the order of 10 to the power of 200 and thus incalculable. Perhaps the best analogy is this: in chess, endgame tablebases have shown errors in, or forced a rewriting of, some of the classic books of chess endgames. It would be fun to see centuries-old concepts in Go having to be refined thanks to modern technology. And it's sort of amazing that it hasn't happened yet. (I know Go won't be outright solved, but I bet a high dan-level program would refute a modest chunk of existing "knowlege".)
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