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Special Issues In Learning Go
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    Keywords: Problem

Moonprince (21k): One of the hardest problems for me in learning and playing go is dealing with medical problems. Specifically, I have narcolepsy, a neurological disorder, and I can definitely see it reflected in my game play. I can't be the only person in the world who has a learning disability of some sort, so I hope we can have some discussion about alternative ways of playing and learning that might be helpful to us 'non-traditional' go players. I'll start the discussion by using myself as a guinea pig, but before I do that, let me establish some ground rules.


Ground Rule #1: Focus on the game. Be specific in both your problems and your suggested coping techniques. For example: 'When there are a lot of stones on the board I get distracted and can't concentrate on the local problem' and 'Try using your hands to cover up the rest of the board so you can see just the part you want to concentrate on.' A vague comment like, 'I have a hard time paying attention' is difficult to know how to answer.

Ground Rule #2: Don't get involved in medical/personal discussions! It's very easy to get sidetracked that way, but this page is about go. If I come back and find stuff like that on this page, I will edit it out. You have been warned!

Corrolary to #2: If you don't know what a particular medical problem or term is, look it up yourself.


Moonprince (21k): Okay, lets float this boat and see if she sails. My issues:

1) I can't read ahead more than two or three moves or so because my brain simply won't map that much abstraction. And even if I could, thirty seconds later I wouldn't remember it.

To compensate for this I depend heavily on pattern recognition. Learning different shapes, like geta (called 'net' in English), is helpful because when a geta is developing I don't have to read it out, I know what it looks like and how to play it. I recognize the pattern and that guides my play.

2) Another problem, related to the reading problem, is that too much input overwhelms my brain, which responds by tuning out the 'extraneous' input and focussing on one small piece. This is a common novice error in go as well, where the player becomes engrossed in the local issue instead of considering the whole board.

Since I can't read all the details of the whole board I try to recognize overall shapes. I am trying to understand things like moyo and estimating territory to develop my whole board pattern recognition skills; I am also trying to develop a strategic feeling for go.

3) I get pushed around the board a lot because I have no plan when coming to the board and never really develop one -- I don't grasp how the game works as a system. The only strategy advice I have really received is 1) corners, sides, middle, and 2) try to reduce the opponent's moyo.

I have checked the currently existing pages on strategy (as of 7 Sept 2002), and found only a little strategic advice. Mostly it seems to discuss 'elements' of strategy. The discussion of amashi and shinogi are what I consider 'strategy' while the other links such as miai and efficiency are elements of the game or principles of the game, which of course have an important role in strategy, but are not 'strategy' themselves. At least as I understand the term.


Tristan Jones

I'm very interested in the Learning Process and found the above intriguing. I have a suggestion which might help you to read a little more deeply.

First, make a string of beads (although you can just use your fingers). Then, use this string when playing a game or doing an exercise. When you need to read, read as far as you comfortably can in the sequence. It does not matter if this only a couple of moves ahead. Now, concentrate very hard on this sequence and move a bead along the string. Then, fingering the bead, go over the sequence in your mind once more, and again, until the bead and the associated sequence form a strong mental link. Next, try to see a couple more moves further ahead, but now associate them with the second bead on the string. Again, repeat until you have formed a strong link in your mind between the sequence and the bead that stands for it. Each bead represents a part of the big sequence -- try to keep going for as many beads as you can manage.

To summarise, the aim is this: instead of trying to read long sequences (which you find difficult because of your condition), you break them down into shorter, manageable ones, and use the beads to help get these into the right order. Don't think of it as cheating, since anybody could do the same thing using their fingers (it's just that a string of beads is nicer).

With time and practice, you might find that you can use this method quite quickly, thereby improving your tactical ability substantially.

The idea of breaking large problems into more manageable, smaller ones may be applicable to strategy as well as reading. You say that you get around the problem of overload ("too much input") by "tuning out...'extraneous'" material and concentrating on "one small piece". Of course, this approach lays you open to many problems, since whole-board issues have to be taken into account when choosing local-scale moves. To get around this, why don't you try to look at each area of the board as a single unit characterised by its features. In other words, instead of seeing lots of separate stones, why not try to see the whole-board as a system of just a few "big" units. Thus, you might call the top "black thickness", the bottom "white territory", the left "vacant" and the right "white thinness". You could use your string of beads to keep these characterisations clear in your mind.

To most readers, such methods may seem slightly cumbersome and artificial, but I hope that Moonprince might find something useful in them. Abstraction is probably easier to deal with if the problems are broken into easy-to-handle units rather than taken as a whole; the beads (or counting on one's fingers) provides an aid to that process.

Best of luck to you, Moonprince. BTW, Sai is cool!



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This is a copy of the living page "Special Issues In Learning Go" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2003 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.