Post A19kYJ2sIt6eOTHLcm by twsh@scholar.social
(DIR) More posts by twsh@scholar.social
(DIR) Post #A18xPjyHvd5TXjQ3t2 by craigmaloney@octodon.social
2020-11-13T03:50:21Z
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JoDee and I are learning the game of Go.Many folks compare chess and Go as though they are in the same category of games.As someone who understands chess and is learning Go I can say they're nothing alike, outside of being long running board games that have white and black pieces.Chess is limited in its moves. Your opening moves are limited to a time-tested number of "good" openers.Go allows any piece anywhere on a 19x19 board. True, some moves are better, but it's open.
(DIR) Post #A18xPkDB2GzsHuNx5s by wzqtparor@mstdn.io
2020-11-13T03:58:16Z
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And some old "good" moves(Joseki) have been proved to be wrong by powerful Go AI.@craigmaloney
(DIR) Post #A18y9sHJNNfMcwJdbc by craigmaloney@octodon.social
2020-11-13T03:53:38Z
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Chess is about humiliating the other player with clever moves. You can play it for speedy checkmate or remove all of your opponent's pieces. Both strategies are about knocking your opponent down.Go has so many different skirmishes going on that you can lose a section of the board and still win the game. Nothing is final. You're both creating the landscape in which one player can claim more territory. It also doesn't reward humiliation: play a capture game and lose the overall war.
(DIR) Post #A18y9sTidFahFQ7Xwe by craigmaloney@octodon.social
2020-11-13T03:57:41Z
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Chess is a puzzle at this point. Your moves are limited on the board. When people talk about all of the various combinations of moves they're overstating their case. You have a handful of good moves, a few great moves, and a lot of terrible moves.People talk about the middle game and end-game of chess as though they are something grand and mysterious, but really you're looking to keep enough pieces on the board to keep applying pressure to your opponent.
(DIR) Post #A18y9t60KuDRAA27cW by craigmaloney@octodon.social
2020-11-13T04:02:42Z
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The endgame in chess is about removing moves from your opponent. Can't go there because check. Can't move there because it's a trap. Better move there to fork two pieces.Big deal.In Go the moves you still can force moves but it's up to the other player to accept that. They have more options to sacrifice or direct attention elsewhere. After every Go game I feel like I've learned something. In every chess game I don't feel I've learned anything. It's just limited.
(DIR) Post #A18y9tWwijlaViddc8 by pj@bitcoinhackers.org
2020-11-13T04:06:36Z
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@craigmaloney Are you playing the computer? In theory, if you're losing, you should be learning something.
(DIR) Post #A18yDgeWXeSdjGzVYG by pj@bitcoinhackers.org
2020-11-13T04:07:19Z
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@craigmaloney I can't really disagree because I haven't played Go.
(DIR) Post #A18yi1bNDYb9OCz3I0 by craigmaloney@octodon.social
2020-11-13T04:12:47Z
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@pj In Go or in chess?In Go I feel like I'm being taught something. In chess all I seem to learn is that every player out there memorizes a bunch of openings, figures out some clever forking moves, and then forces mate at the the earliest point they can. Oh, and the good players can play out many combinations of moves in their head.What lesson should I take away from that?
(DIR) Post #A1903vxYyXHkDRNE5w by CarlCravens@mastodon.xyz
2020-11-13T04:26:52Z
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@craigmaloney I've studied both (not very good at either) and came to similar conclusions. I was really disheartened to find a huge chunk of chess was memorizing openings. You can play by principles, but you lose to opponents with equal skill but better memorization. Go has it's memorization in corner fights (joseki), but it's less dominant in the learning process.In chess, learning to calculate, to look ahead, is critical... go has much less emphasis on calculation, and I like that.
(DIR) Post #A190T0NrfBgRB1dAq8 by craigmaloney@octodon.social
2020-11-13T04:31:32Z
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@CarlCravens I found myself having better games with Go if I had the board set up and looked at it each turn. That sounds nutty, but it's true. Surveying the board and letting it tell me where I was in trouble, where I was gaining ground, and where my opponent wanted to play next was just so flipping eye-opening for me. I've played on my phone for years and it wasn't until I set up the board and paid attention to it that I started understanding better what the board was telling me.
(DIR) Post #A190fkt2ao1esUIE76 by craigmaloney@octodon.social
2020-11-13T04:34:47Z
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@CarlCravens Thing too with Joseki is it's not 100% about memorization but recognizing a pattern and understanding how to respond to that pattern. That's way more useful to me than the chess puzzles that say "find the best move for white" where best move was relative at best, and that board position was unlikely to ever appear again.
(DIR) Post #A193a3ixwTKhQUYWwa by pj@bitcoinhackers.org
2020-11-13T05:07:22Z
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@craigmaloney I haven't played Go. Personally I play a chess computer algorithm. I can see what you're saying, but I wouldn't assume the game is boring. I don't really know the standard openings and bc of that I think maybe I created my own opening, I have yet to check books to see if what I'm doing is a standard opening...I use it because I can get a serious game started with the computer...I find playing defensively makes the algo more interesting as well.
(DIR) Post #A193ygZBBBoyqKimBs by craigmaloney@octodon.social
2020-11-13T05:11:49Z
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@pj Try Go sometime and get back to me once you have. 😀
(DIR) Post #A194LPrJSoWtgb2eZc by pj@bitcoinhackers.org
2020-11-13T05:15:56Z
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@craigmaloney weak opening = poor protection, a computer a skilled opponent I think will find a weakness and go for the exploit, so the challenge for me is to keep a strong defense while maintaining some kind of offense, problem is an algorithm will always win (sees every eventuality) so I have two choices, learn by losing or turn down the algorithm's difficulty, it's not super exciting but if I'm stuck waiting in line at the DMV, I find it's a calming distraction, LOL.
(DIR) Post #A197SKUs66aywhX7hI by pj@bitcoinhackers.org
2020-11-13T05:50:48Z
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@craigmaloney OK. I hate chess openings too, but now I just think of it as protecting my king/queen from simple textbook attacks, usually an attack from a bishop or knight. In general, that's the only threat early on, having king/queen boxed in. Everything else can be sacrificed & recovered from (the fun part.) The secondary threat is losing control of the middle of the board, but that's not necessarily a problem. So I think you can still play strong w/o memorization.
(DIR) Post #A19ZNQhGPsvZRWmVsG by twsh@scholar.social
2020-11-13T08:34:13Z
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@craigmaloney Do you have recommendations for starting to learn Go? A colleague took me through the rules once but that's it.
(DIR) Post #A19ZNQrXnf9PxPaitk by EdS@mastodon.sdf.org
2020-11-13T11:03:37Z
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I've heard the advice "lose your first 100 games quickly"I think it's good to play against someone who is interested in helping you make progress in your game.It love that Go has a handicapping system. I love the combination of tactics with strategy. It's crucial that several things might be going on, and each play should be made in the best place, not necessarily in the current fight.Watch the alphago commentaries!(I'm a poor go player... if at all.)@twsh @craigmaloney
(DIR) Post #A19hSYWZXZcqnijgo4 by craigmaloney@octodon.social
2020-11-13T04:10:01Z
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And that's before you get to handicapping games, or playing on smaller boards, or the myriad of ways that Go can adapt to the players. Chess doesn't afford the same handicapping without strange rules or piece removal:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_(chess)It's not elegant, and worse, you have to think about what might be the right level of handicapping. With Go it's not nearly as fraught.
(DIR) Post #A19hSYl6fXFfWnXISe by craigmaloney@octodon.social
2020-11-13T04:19:04Z
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There's a reason that there are hundreds of thousands of pages written about chess: it's an easy game to write about. There's boarloads of books on correct openings, correct middle-game pay, and correct endgame play. They're annotated, deconstructed, and elaborated. Breathless prose about the brilliance of moves highlight the pages.And eventually those moves stop being brilliant because other players learn how to route around them. They learn how to defeat those moves.
(DIR) Post #A19hSYvO3JTW2gLVU8 by craigmaloney@octodon.social
2020-11-13T04:23:49Z
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Chess is an arms race, much like the books on poker. They're folks trying to be on the cutting edge of move technology.In short they're not about understanding the game but about being more clever than their opponents. It's why the metagame of slapping pieces and trash-talking is so prevalent in speed chess. It's making chess in to a confidence game. The game becomes secondary to the primary game of pushing your opponent off-balance to gain an advantage.
(DIR) Post #A19hSZ4bV2qcVGerqq by craigmaloney@octodon.social
2020-11-13T04:29:00Z
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Go has that component as well, but it's not as direct. There's still a level of respect. That's why computer chess isn't as popular with more experienced chess players: there's none of that metagame happening with a computer that doesn't care about how cleverly or how loudly you smash those pieces against the board.
(DIR) Post #A19hSZJ8d0TRELSTVQ by craigmaloney@octodon.social
2020-11-13T04:40:14Z
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If anyone tells you they're a very smart person because they play chess well please decouple the chess ability from whatever other abilities they have. Chess is not a smart game. Being good at chess is like being good at memorizing trivia: it's a skill that can be impressive but is not a measure of intellect. It's about recognizing a handful of patterns and executing them effectively to unbalance your opponent. And it's no wonder that computers have excelled at chess.
(DIR) Post #A19hSZVtrYgLrvQfOi by CarlCravens@mastodon.xyz
2020-11-13T12:34:12Z
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@craigmaloney Oh man... I'm a smart guy. I took to coding like a fish to water, I'm a great problem solver. I studied chess... worked problems, studied openings, tried to understand principles of play. I owned so many books. I'm a D-class tournament player. I get beat by school children.
(DIR) Post #A19iZsWVgPN8o9lKQC by craigmaloney@octodon.social
2020-11-13T12:46:44Z
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@pj Oh it's possible but you're still trying to build a shape in the center of the board where your pieces have access to both defend from and attack your opponent. That's part of the memorization (knowing which positions are better at keeping the opponent off-balance).In chess you've got the middle of the board you're trying to conquer. In Go you've got many "middle of the board" battles in play. Memorization goes straight out the window.
(DIR) Post #A19jFhqLmUxRqZzHqS by craigmaloney@octodon.social
2020-11-13T12:54:16Z
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@EdS @twsh This is sound advice because it's by failure that you learn the most in Go.There are many good books for learning Go:* "Learn to Play Go" by Janice Kim and Jeong Soo-hyun is one series that I like.* "Learn Go" by Neil Moffatt is also one that I enjoy (along with Neil's other books in the series.I like his approach of explaining each move instead of the usual approach of showing multiple moves at once and then explaining them.The Peter Shotwell books are good too.
(DIR) Post #A19kYJ2sIt6eOTHLcm by twsh@scholar.social
2020-11-13T12:57:21Z
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@craigmaloney Thanks! @EdS
(DIR) Post #A19kYJWeWAvRspD82S by EdS@mastodon.sdf.org
2020-11-13T13:08:51Z
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I like the idea that one should learn some amount of tactical skill by playing on a reduced board. But not so much as to become good at it: it's not the whole game, by any stretch.The thing about strategic play is that you have to judge between different tactical situations already in play: you need a tactical sense.See perhapshttps://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/6336/how-does-the-full-size-board-change-the-game-of-go(I too was put off chess by the nature of the learnable opening book. I didn't want to learn a book.)@twsh @craigmaloney
(DIR) Post #A19lzM716ptvg6g75U by EdS@mastodon.sdf.org
2020-11-13T13:24:58Z
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Some slightly varied opinions on learning go by playing on smaller boards here:https://senseis.xmp.net/?WhoShouldPlayOnWhichBoardSizeOne thing about the smaller board is that a game is shorter, so you get more learning per hour.Also mentioned there is playing to first capture or to Nth capture.The ideal, I'm sure, is to be playing with people at broadly your level. The handicap only works to a degree.@twsh @craigmaloney
(DIR) Post #A19mqIikRuBoVXZaYS by craigmaloney@octodon.social
2020-11-13T13:34:31Z
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@twsh @EdS One thing I'd also recommend is playing the game as best you can but being gracious and kind to yourself in defeat. You will try things that won't work. You'll play against the computer and they'll seem relentless in their attack and clever in their ways to thwart you. You'll want to take it personally. You're not broken, it's part of the learning process. Go teaches you humility and grace in failure if you're willing to accept the lesson.