Is the old philosophy in Go irrelevant?

General Go Discussion
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Yeah but middle game is dependent on your innate reading ability.
Opening is the only one I can significantly improve.

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I suspect that even at the highest levels in Go, if you had a player dedicate enough time to studying some “non-AI” openings very intensively and became very familiar with them and their followups, they could be competitive with other pros, with any slight theoretical disadvantage being compensated by their greater familiarity with those patterns than other pros who play the now more mainstream AI-like corner patterns more often.

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reading ability is not purely innate:
It is built of a few components

  1. Familiarity with the game and available tactics (Intuition)
  2. Evaluation of results
  3. Visualization (or substitutive skill for aphantasic folks) of lines
  4. Memory of lines already covered and what problems went wrong
  5. Focus and diligence

All of which can be trained in one way or another (tsumego covers a lot of this)

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True, and also Mid-Game depends on more than just reading ability (especially if it’s a pretty pacific game).

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25

I don’t know why you say this.
The same fundamentals are used in the opening and the middle game. Same reading too.

You can’t be that much exhaustive with josekis and opening pattern, that’s misleading when trying to progress. Studying them will bring benefits for sure but thinking it in a catalog project is mostly losing time.

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It’s unbelievable how much you don’t know about the game you’ve been playing all your life.
Mickey Mantle.

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27

True, but in chess the moves are made with the pieces and in Go the moves are made on the empty intersections. So the equivalent of the pieces in chess would be empty space in Go. Go could be conceived of as destroying those empty intersections. In both games we destroy potential future moves.

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28

I understand you. I lost a lot of time until the myth of “peaceful” Go melted in my head. Now I am sure that “peaceful” Go is possible only in two cases:

  1. If the game is played between two great masters and both of them do not want to fight;
  2. If the game is played between two great cowards.

However, in these cases, “peaceful” Go still remains a rarity. And that’s okay. Struggle is part of our nature, it is the driving force of our life and the life of the whole world. Go could not be a mirror of the world if there was no place for struggle in it.

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I don’t know that it doesn’t exist altogether, there can be other forms of struggle,

unless peace also means not offering anything that can ever be attacked,

But I will go to bat for the concept of a “virtual battle” as mentioned in the Clausewitz treatise “Vom Kriege”, that when armies pass up the opportunity to battle, there is still a winner and a loser of that battle, only without the casualties of both sides testing it out. As such he created his theory that it could still be interpreted in a series of battles even if not a single shot gets fired.

I see Go very similarly, the only reason we don’t cut everything we see isn’t because we want to play peaceful (well, maybe some people), but because we have read out the cuts in our heads and decided it was a bad idea. Any amount of bookishness about a “good fight” should be backed up by reading or fall worthless at the feet of a Fox player

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30

I’m baffled that I frequently have opponents resign midgame after loosing a fight, even though they are still ahead overall. Maybe they have they have the same belief as you that the game is over after 50 moves. I disagree. I’m ~ 8k and mostly playing auto-match games, and don’t resign myself unless I’m pretty sure I can’t win anymore.

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31

FWIW a wise dan mentor told me : never ever resign before move 150.

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32

“No one ever won a game by resigning” - Francis Roads

“But you could gain a friend who gives you a review to help you improve, or time to do something more productive” - me

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33

As long as i can play a game again, it doesn’t bother me that much.

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If someone was only interested in climbing up the OGS ladders and nothing else, then they would probably resign more easily. In the ladders we can only have 3 outgoing challenges at all times, and lost games don’t really matter until you’re at the top; the only thing that matters is won games.

So, if this player who wants to climb the ladder makes a mistake in a joseki at the very beginning of the game, then it would make sense for them to resign and start another game which will be more easy to win, rather than spend the next 250 moves trying to win this badly-started game.

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35

Squandering time is one of the great pleasures of youth, since youths have so much of it available. At a certain age, however, one becomes acutely aware of how little time is left, and so one becomes a guardian of that most precious commodity. It is the old who live the real life of “quiet desperation,” as Thoreau called it, and he even inadvertently applied it to go: “What is called resignation is confirmed desperation” (emphasis added).

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I thought “quiet desperation” is the english way?

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Summary

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Summary

And you run, and you run
To catch up with the sun
But it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way
But you’re older
Shorter of breath, and one day closer to death
Every year is getting shorter
Never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught
Or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation
Is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over
Thought I’d something more to say

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The term is best known from Thoreau’s Walden, which I read when I was 11. It was a major formative book for me when i was growing up.

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Yes, when you mentioned it, I thought maybe Pink Floyd got it from there.

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