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TristanJones

 

Force Feeding
   

Tristan I came across some problems headed "Korean Baduk Academy" on Gobase the other day. The contributor, Pierre Audouard, said that in Korea students go through all the problems in a level in about 30-60 minutes and then start over, performing the exercise 4 or 5 times.

This entails doing up to 100 L&D problems in a single sitting. I have decided to try this over the next few weeks and see what effect it has upon me.

What I have noticed thus far is this: it feels like the patterns and motives are being burned into my mind by force. There is something much more impressive about seeing so many ideas repeatedly in such a short time than learning them in a more gentle way (e.g., just doing a few problems each day).

I call this approach to learning "force-feeding". It can be painful, in a way, but can it be successful because it is such an intense experience?

Please share your thoughts with me!

unkx80: This is pretty much an Asian way of learning things in general, especially the Chinese, in what we usually call "cramming". It is often practiced in schools, where students will literally do tons of exercises over and over again on a topic so that they will remember them. It can be very effective for Mathematics, and probably also in Go. But my own personal experience is that such cramming is often only good for memorizing facts before an examination, and after the examination I forget them all.

Charles Cramming is known in the UK! In fact young people who fail important exams may be sent to a 'crammer' school to make sure they pass a retake.

I know that Korean instruction does place a high value on life-and-death study. I think the reason lies in the teachability of this kind of material: you can learn more and more if you really need to.

Here Matthew Macfadyen has advocated something that may be slightly different: high-speed solving of simple problems. I'd be interested in anyone's positive experiences of this.

Tristan Ah, yes, of course it is cramming. I didn't recall the term in this case because before now I have tended to study things in according to the principle of "little and often". This, on the other hand, is a "lot and often". Whatever you call it, I think the key must be, as I said, to make learning a really intense experience, laden with memorability because of that.

As an aside, I have used mnemonics such as the "Roman rooms" and silly mental images to remember things and do find them quite effective sometimes, but I have to say, I don't believe anything is quite so effective as good old-fashioned repetition. Even a thickie like me starts to remember things when they've seen them a couple of hundred times.

unkx80: Yes I agree. I think one reason why cramming works for life and death questions is that because many of them follow some rather basic patterns. As we repeatedly attempt the various life and death questions, the patterns will emerge and these are the ones that stay in the memory, and these are also the patterns applicabile in actual games. And this actually improves on intuition and often good intuition can help prune the mental "search tree" when a given position can be mapped into one or more patterns already stored in the brain. I suppose this is why some players are described as "sharp": their mental response to the opponent's weaknesses is fast because they are well trained in pattern recognition. =)

Grauniad: Tristan, it's a bit tedious going through the [ext] Korean Baduk Problems you mention over a slow dialup line. Have you found any way to download them in bulk or to view more than two at a time so one is not bothered by the network delay?



This is a copy of the living page "Force Feeding" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2003 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.