However, I did forget about the whole thing about how once you get into your late 20s or early 30s, many professionals say that is the end of your potential.
I similarly reject that, but it holds a bit more steadfastly than most others.
Ah, I really don’t want to get into an argument so I’ll just leave you with this:
“It is usually a mistake to calculate statustics from IQs or other age-normed scores because they summarize not ability but comparative ability.” (L.J. Cronbach, Essentials of Psychological Testing, 5th ed., p.242)
Assuming there was a common basis for IQ (for the sake of argument), someone’s IQ of 200 can be the same as another’s IQ of 50, it all depends on the reference group. This is the reason why there are many charlatans out there who maliciously ignore all necessary assumptions and limitations for comparative measures and misinterpret IQ scores - again, always remember what the quote above means and implies.
Moreover, when you talk about someone’s “limit” with respect to attainable Go rank, you’re talking about aptitude. When you talk about someone’s current level or usual performance, you’re talking about ability. It is fallacious to infer someone’s aptitude from a measure of comparative ability.
The difference between what people are capable of and how they usually perform merely shows the massive impact of habits. If you practice something a lot, you will improve in that field as well as related fields (see: dynamic model of intelligence).
For someone to not improve, this person merely needs to study less (or less adequately) than their peers. If you’ve hit a wall, maybe it’s because you aren’t practicing tsumego, studying joseki, studying tesuji, studying pro games or playing as many games against stronger people compared to your peers. Again, Go rating/rank is also a measure of comparative ability. 1d here might be 10k elsewhere or vice versa, it depends on the reference group. There is nothing “dan” about a “dan player” other than the fact that there are many people who -on average- play worse moves.
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Surprisingly, not always. Most of the time my walls are broken after a hiatus. While studying definitely helps. It is often some more fundamental change to one’s thought patterns.
Here’s the deal – I don’t believe such a limit exists. Such thinking is shallow, and an excuse for not performing well. When I refer to “aptitude” or, more commonly, “talent”, I refer to how quickly one can learn in the initial burst of their career, not how high their “limit” is.
Close, but these two things are not the same (in a research context). Talent is observed achievement. Aptitude is predicted achievement.
hey 3mushroom3
I hope that reading all of these responses is encouraging for you. I think your reaction speaks to something universal between go players - the feeling that no matter how much you learn, there is always SO MUCH MORE.
Sure it can be daunting - and I’ve had that feeling at many stages of my learning process - usually when I learn about some new level of go strategy that I had been ignorant of before. “Now I have to learn all this?!?” DESPAIR! But then, eventually, I calm down and start wrapping my brain around this new strategy/tactic, and it gets back to the excitement of learning and trying new things out.
Imagine you were staring a new martial art. You get your white belt and start doing the beginner’s exercises, but then you see the dan-level black belts practicing in the next room. You know you don’t have the skills to fight them yet. Do you get insipred to keep going - knowing how much more you have to learn? Or do you give up in the face of that seemingly insurmountable learning curve?
The trick is to just focus on the next level-up task in front of you. You don’t have to beat a black belt - you just have to level up and earn your white belt, and then your orange belt and so on. You have to accept that there are things to be learned at every stage, and that the stages are there for a reason - so you can incorporate all the various fundamentals, and then begin learning the more complex stuff on top of that base.
So, with that in mind, here are my tips for beginners:
- Watch Dwyrin’s Back to Basics - 01 - Fundamental Play
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8f5-vAZ3Jik&list=PLv4MbeLo6yXkNDDJVNVQcZ5WuyS85gvwO
The most important thing to learn from this is that fundamentals matter, and that you don’t need a 1000 fancy joseki or complex tetsuji to win a game. You don’t even need to fight or capture, you just need to be a TEENSY WEENSY bit more efficient than your opponent.
Watch it, then watch it again from the beginning. Let the realization grow in your mind. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. Just figure out which level of danger you are in at any moment, and if you have sente, make moves that increase territory and keep you connected. (are your stones “settled”? are all your cut points covered? are your groups outnumbered anywhere on the board? If not - curl around your opponent anywhere they are weak!)
- Learn from AI bots: a lot of people will probably disagree with me here, because playing with humans will expose you to a LOT more variety than playing against (or learning from) AI bots. That is all true. However, there are many useful things the beginner can learn by watching bots - especially those that are trained on a neural network - because it’s like having a much more experienced player holding your hand.
Go download yourself a desktop version of Leela
https://www.sjeng.org/leela.html
or if you just want to mess around with it in a browser, there’s this online version of a fairly decent DCNN
https://chrisc36.github.io/deep-go/
On either one of them, you can turn on the heat-map of possible move-responses and see how the AI views the next best moves on the board.
Start playing against the AI, but let it “hold your hand” by suggesting the next move. Compare the move you want to make with the move the computer suggests you make. Can you see why one is better than another? What is the computer trying to accomplish at each step? Why is it choosing THAT moment to make that move rather than another?
- Learn the stages of the game (i.e. Opening, Midgame, Endgame and all the bits in between). It took me a long time to figure out that the reason I was losing was that I kept doing the right moves at the wrong times. That I was jumping out to the middle when I should have been grabbing edge territory (during opening). Or that I was trying to consolidate edge territory and getting capped/reduced (in midgame). Or that I was trying to hold on to my mid-game gains and getting reduced to nothing (in endgame).
Each stage of a go game has a delicate balance where the person who grabs the most efficient route and holds on to it will usually get the advantage, and it’s not always obvious what the right choice in any situation might be. Learning to read the overall risk estimates for your groups takes time, but once you learn how to do it, a lot of the mystery will start to clear up, and your next move will become more obvious.
It’s confusing because - a lot of times - you see the really good players on OGS ignoring the stages of the game completely. Rather than establish groups in all 4 corners, really good players will often start a contact fight in one corner and keep that up for 100-150 moves before even trying to fight for another corner. Sure - it happens all the time.
However, for beginning to intermediate players, learning how to play a balanced opening and then transition that into midgame strategy (i.e. moving out to the middle or pincering a weak group, etc) is a very valuable fundamental skill to have in your toolbox. Don’t just think that you can FIGHT FIGHT KILL KILL your opponent all over the board 100% of the time. It might work sometimes, but eventually you’ll meet the player that is good at spotting overplay, knows how to keep their groups alive, and is just that tiny bit more efficient about grabbing edge territory, and they will consistently win, no matter how aggressively you try to kill and capture.
I hope that helps.
Just remember, your next goal is not to become the best go player of all time - it is to gain just a tiny bit more understanding. Hopefully, the incremental rewards gained along the way will seem worth it.
cheers!
tonyb
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