This website for learning Go is amazing! It's like a gentle old man is teaching you:
"Look, they will be out of breath when they put the pieces like this - as if they were gently lifted away."
After clicking the mouse a few times, you can actually understand the breathing and life and death in the thousand-year chess game. It turns out that learning Go can be as natural as playing games
Learn to play Go
151–159 of 159 posts
Re: Learn to play Go
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, I see. Not rendering white makes these lessons impossible. It's interesting that the shading for the white pieces is preserved. I wonder if a dark mode extension is affecting the colors.
oooo I'm dumb lol. Yea I'm forcing dark mode
I'm glad we figured it out! Have fun.
Re: Learn to play Go
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I appreciate the discussion in any case. I'll review the position more. But this kind of discussion is missing from the tutorial in any regards. This is where I believe I'm stuck in the ~9kyu level and feel like its been mostly about this middle-game movement / direction of play stuff since 15kyu or so.
> This is where I believe I'm stuck in the ~9kyu level and feel like its been mostly about this middle-game movement / direction of play stuff since 15kyu or so. Sure. But you put in the effort to get that far. You can't just put everything in the beginner tutorial. They'll get confused. And there's only so far you can go with one-size-fits-all lessons, without feedback from the student.
I appreciate the discussion as well.
After having checked the positions you mentioned, I had put you somewhere in the 4-10 kyu range. For me this was the time when I found out how important it is to play efficient and fast and play big spots. In order to improve further, I had to learn to appreciate thickness more because of the downstream benefits. As the fighting of both players becomes stronger, thicker shape makes your side of the fight much easier and prevents everything from crumbling.
Take your first example where you suggested 1-point jump or keima instead of nobi. The main point here is about 1) liberties and 2) having your group‘s „head“ run ahead. There is also this concept of a hard head or a soft head and the nobi creates a wonderful hard head ahead of your opponents stones that can not be bullied. If you play any other move, a stronger opponent will (locally) immediately and gladly play that hane without thinking, which takes a liberty and forces you to play again to defend your stones. Depending on your moves, the opponent would turn your group into a big dumpling and collect very nice stones on the outside in the process.
Perhaps you would find the games of Kitani Minoru or Lee Chang’ho inspiring.
Re: Learn to play Go
#154I first learned to play Go back in university, but never got very good (it was competing with learning how to program). Many years later, shortly after the war in Ukraine started, I was looking for an activity to share with my 8-year-old son. Life was chaotic then: everyone was anxious, we were hosting a refugee lady, and I could see the stress taking a toll on him. I wanted something where it would be clear we shoul…
> [...] spend our vacations at Go summer camp. The camp is actually a magical event. I look forward to it the whole year. I've been going there for the past 20 years and been the main organizer the last 10 years. The magic happens by itself though.
The tasuki who put Cho Chikun sensei‘s problems online without solutions as pdfs?
Thank you, Sir! I have learned so much from these pdfs.
Re: Learn to play Go
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I do wonder how Lee Sodul will react if we told him that the superhuman AI he played could not see ladders... and had other such key weaknesses. I wonder what Kasparov thinks of the fact that he was beaten by such a primitive chess program as Deep Blue's!
Ladders are a thing so easy that its literally in this beginner series of tutorials. Its a thing that 30kyu beginners learn and master. Its very strange to me that AlphaGo / AlphaZero was unable to ever learn ladders. It shows that the way humans learn and AIs learn is quite different (or at least, MCTS + Neural Net machines learn differently). Yes, Go is a strategic game of patterns and perhaps we humans overemphasi…
Do you know of a systematic study of the AG - Lee Sedol match with contemporary KataGo?
I’ve never seen this written up.
Re: Learn to play Go
#156I've been playing Go with my spouses brother for a while. He had a lot of free time to studyGo back then, I didn't. I couldn't get a single win out of him, still I enjoyed every single game. We rarely play anymore, I should invite him over sometime :-)
I'm on the other side of this, meeting a friend two or three times a month to play Go and giving him a three stone handicap on a 13 by 13 board. Sometimes I play a move with a huge, but hidden threat behind it. If he plays elsewhere instead of answering locally, I get to play a clever sequence and capture some stones. I could just wait for the blunder and win. Instead I give a quick lesson in tactics: here is my plan…
"two or three stones" sound huge. We are 20k vs 14k, iirc that does not justify a three stone handicap.
Our games feel relatively close, it's just evident that he is always ahead.
Re: Learn to play Go
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you dislike chess because you don't like abstract total information strategy board games you will not like go I think that's why I don't like chess. It seems to me that a winning strategy would be to think as far ahead as possible by enumerating all the permutations. A few heuristics exist however.
The neat thing about Go is that, whilst the winning strategy is exactly to think ahead and enumerate all possible positions, to do so is impossible. (Even the superhuman AI fudge it. They can just read farther ahead than humans.) So to do well you have to learn how to support your reading ahead with heuristics and a feel for the game. A famous amateur player and advocate for the game once went through all the game re…
> A famous amateur player and advocate for the game once went through all the game records of Go Seigen in order to digitize them. This means having to pore over hand-written diagrams looking for the next number in the sequence of moves. Obviously this is easier if you can guess where to look. But, if you guess them all correctly, then you are playing just as well as the old master! After spending a good few months on the task, he was a significantly better player!
I'd never heard of this!! Who're you talking about?
Re: Learn to play Go
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm on the other side of this, meeting a friend two or three times a month to play Go and giving him a three stone handicap on a 13 by 13 board. Sometimes I play a move with a huge, but hidden threat behind it. If he plays elsewhere instead of answering locally, I get to play a clever sequence and capture some stones. I could just wait for the blunder and win. Instead I give a quick lesson in tactics: here is my plan…
"two or three stones" sound huge. We are 20k vs 14k, iirc that does not justify a three stone handicap. Our games feel relatively close, it's just evident that he is always ahead.
On a 19 x 19 board the ranks are traditionally determined by the handicap needed to give an even game. So a 14 kyu would give 20 - 14 = 6 stones to a 20 kyu. 20 kyu is a rank that often sees rapid improvement, as the basic ideas "click" just through play and experience. You might be stronger than that now.
Handicap stones give a greater advantage on smaller boards, but 19 x 19 is the standard size. I've not seen any specific guidance for smaller boards.
Re: Learn to play Go
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
> [...] spend our vacations at Go summer camp. The camp is actually a magical event. I look forward to it the whole year. I've been going there for the past 20 years and been the main organizer the last 10 years. The magic happens by itself though.
The tasuki who put Cho Chikun sensei‘s problems online without solutions as pdfs? Thank you, Sir! I have learned so much from these pdfs.
Yes that one. Welcome :)