Improving Reading
On Reading
There are three primary elements, it seems, to reading.
- Depth
- Clarity
- Speed
These three elements are key. "Depth" is reading out a ladder for 30 moves. "Clarity" is reading 20 moves and seeing the ladderblock. It's also seeing the other ladderblock that lets you make it work. And "speed" is doing this all in less than 2 minutes.
Ignoring these three elements, there is something even more important.
Intuition
When you see a corner problem that has 10 different starting points, reading all those variations can be done...if you have great speed. But logically, there are a total of 10! variations to be read. That's a lot.
Intuition is the answer. (See article referenced below.)
It will provide you with an idea for the first move and let you stop reading several moves into the problem.
Several interesting questions rise:
How to improve these various areas?
- Speed: Doing lots of problems in a short amount of time may help. This also improves intuition, as the first move must be correct or almost correct
- Clarity: Do problems that force you to see 20 moves ahead and then see clearly little twists?
- Depth: Do long problems?
- Intuition: Doing lots of easy problems in a short amount of time is believed to improve intuition (see Force Feeding)
Reading uses the pattern recognition areas of the brain which can be strengthened by daily mental exercices, preferably doing go problems. William Cobb writes how daily Sudoku puzzles improved his go reading.
More on intuition
And finally, how does one improve intuition?
How does one gain the ability to solve problems like this:
This would be a moderate depth problem, but mainly an intuition one. It would seem that to learn to solve this problem you would need to train your intuition to a fantastic degree, yet training something as vague as intuition seems a difficult task.
/Solution?
Per the article referenced below, the answer is Practice, Practice, Practice. ...what matters is not experience per se but "effortful study," which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence
How long?
Another question: How long does it take to improve reading? Quite possibly, only one aspect would improve at a time, but how long does it take to improve reading? What does improving at reading mean? (I.e., you study problems for a month. How much can you expect to improve at reading, and how can you test any actual gains.)
References:
The Expert Mind by Philip E Ross in
Scientific American