Discussion of the relationship of student rank to commercial teaching

Both are useful, humans and AIs. An AI can show you sequences that are not difficult to read, but that wouldn’t have come to your mind. Or that you didn’t see where the biggest place on the board was. Or it can show you that you were too lazy to read, but that if you had strived to read before playing, then you would have realized that your group is already safe and that you don’t need to add a move.

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Tournaments expenditures (including transportation)
In my opinion, real life tournaments are a big booster for progress. If you like them and try to join them as often as possible, it can become quite a budget.
All my love for organizations who cared to offer cheap accomodations and fees.

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This is my problem with AI, I find that it might suggest a killing move and then the sequence(s) continue with tenuki. I have to assume that the group in question is dead but don’t necessarily have any idea why or how if there might still be several further moves to finish the job. This leaves the likelihood that the dead group could be made to live due to some non-obvious sequence where you might easily make a mistake. A human teacher I would expect to explain this or highlight major pitfalls. But AI just moves on leaving you not much the wiser.

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I think the amount of people paying for teaching has probably decreased based on the way I have seen people act and put so much trust in bots.

Unfortunately people believe that a bot will teach them everything and more.

But, even people who make bots tell you that while bots are great to learn from they are not better teachers then physical people. Often times people even try to become the bot rather then learning from it and end up going in terrible directions. Bots play the way they do because its something they are capable of doing reading 100s of moves ahead and in order for a human to get to that point (if at all possible) they need to be capable of doing the lesser variations first.

You can’t just simply go from 10kyu to 9dan and suddenly skip a ton of ranks by learning from bots going through each rank even if at a faster pace is needed. Getting high or low dan teachers is not obsolete compared to bots and people who are looking for special attention should still consider getting a teacher instead of neglecting them.

Of course I get that we are in a financial crisis and I am not saying slam all your money down on a teacher. Just that if you have money and you are considering a teacher. Do not listen to someone who will tell you a bot will do better at teaching you because its simply not true.

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Do you mean that the attacker tenukied after several moves?
If so, does the sequence occur inside or outside the killed group?
If some moves are outside then I understand. The attacker doesn’t want to kill but just to make outside profit or make endgame moves. Any moves inside are sacrificed stones that allow to make forcing moves outside.

If all the sequence is inside then I don’t understand, and I haven’t noticed any situation like that when reviewing with AI. Do you have an example?

Or did you mean that the defender tenukied and you don’t understand why the group is dead? Then you can play with the AI and try other defending moves to see how the AI refutes them. AI has to be used interactively.

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Yes, more like this combined with my laziness! You are absolutely right that I don’t spend enough time exploring, although I have not previously had access to ai variations.

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AI is to learning Go as a pocket calculator is to learning math (actually, that’s old-school thinking, I should probably say as Maple or Mathematica are to learning math).

In a word, handy. Surely a teacher is a nice luxury, but this thread started off as “do I need to spend $100/Month as I progress through my Go education?”.

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AI is to learning Go as a pocket calculator is to learning math (…) in a word, handy. A teacher is a nice luxury

I think you summed up the situation very succintly.

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I actually like this analogy a lot good stuff.

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