> maybe it's my poor old brain, but the middle of the game is so > complicated (for me), that after some amount of time i get > diminishing returns. it gets *really* complicated. it's not just > reading (lookahead), it's judgement as to how this particular line of > battle will have an effect on other battles.
i think that it's easy to underestimate the importance of judgement. on a 19x19 board, there are simply many moves that need to be made for non-tactical reasons, and many moves which are made for 2 (or 3 or 4 or more) possible future reasons. once the product of these possibilities blows up to some unreasonable number, you're "driving blind" whenever you make a non-tactical move. you're strictly using your own best judgement, doing some reading here and there to winnow down the set of possibilities to something reasonable. no human-available or computer-available amount of lookahead will tell you what the right move is to make in many of these situations, *even if you're correct in knowing what the best goal is for that boardposition at that time*. stronger players 'know the right move' because they are able to eliminate 90% of the choices that i'm still fumbling around with. and they don't necessarily eliminate them with lookahead, they often eliminate them with 'judgement'. the goals themselves as well as the explication of the 'judgement' are often defined in completely non-computer-parseable ways. i'd argue that that's because the concepts involved are actually shorthand ways of representing ridiculous amounts of knowledge and experience. definitely not something that can be substituted for with lookahead. it's probably easiest to see this if you watch a game 8+ stones above your rank until you see a completely inexplicable move (as opposed to just a move that you thought was great but didn't think of), then ask a stronger player why that move was played, and try to wrap your brain around the answer, which will quite often have nothing to do with lookahead. repeat as necessary. in my case, i've had the experience of realizing that there were *entire new and crucial ways of thinking about groups of moves* that i had never considered before on my own, maybe 15-20 times. each one probably represented a single increase in my rank, and the rest of it can be attributed to my 'reading', or fighting lookahead, which is pretty weak. back to Ray Tayek, who at 1d said that he considers 33% of his moves to be blunders. i'm around 8k, and my estimate for myself is > 93%. this is based upon the following observation: when i watch a game between two much stronger players, i can guess in advance with a high degree of certainty what their next moves are going to be about 10 moves out of the first 150. this would make my alternate move choices 'blunders' 140/150 of the time, or 93% of the time. to be rigorous, the percentage of the time that i would choose a better move is < 1%, as is the percentage of the time that our differing choices would have equal weight in the outcome of the game. since these are not perfect players, at least some of the time when we agree, we are both wrong. so 93% is a lower bound. s. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Any questions? Get answers on any topic at www.Answers.yahoo.com. Try it now. _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
