Jonii comments on Rationality Lessons in the Game of Go - Less Wrong

40 Post author: GreenRoot 21 August 2010 02:33PM

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Comment author: MatthewW 22 August 2010 08:20:04AM 0 points [-]

The first is certainly valid reasoning in Go, and I phrased it in a way that should make that obvious. But you can also phrase it as "I've spent so much effort trying to reach goal X that I'm committed now", which is almost never sound in real life.

For the second, I'm not thinking so much of tewari as a fairly common kind of comment in professional game commentaries. I think there's an implicit "and I surely haven't made a mistake as disastrous as a two point loss" in there.

It's probably still not sound reasoning, but for most players the best strategy for finding good moves relies more on 'feel' and a bag of heuristics than on reasoning. I'm not sure I'd count that as a way that Go differs from real life, though.

Comment author: Jonii 23 August 2010 09:53:38PM 0 points [-]

But you can also phrase it as "I've spent so much effort trying to reach goal X that I'm committed now", which is almost never sound in real life.

Thanks to go, I've learned NOT to think like this, but to adjust according to the new information that flows in. It seems rather weird that you can get two totally opposite lessons from the same game.