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Morendil comments on Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2 - Less Wrong
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The phenomenon of plateaus in learning is fairly common, and in Go specifically if you look at a graph of how a population of players are distributed in terms of ranks, it has several noticeable discontinuities.
So the Go jump isn't too surprising.
The one with akrasia is, because I wouldn't think of that as something you were learning.
My particular jumps in Go strength came after reading more new theory, trying to integrate it into my game for a while (and failing), and then frustratedly taking a break. I'd come back a few kyu stronger, and games would consolidate this into maybe another stone or two's increase in strength.
This happened enough that I stopped feeling frustrated (rather just stuck) and proactively took breaks. Usually about a week would do it.
After reading the post about Go, I started playing for a while ... and I was so bad so consistently I quit playing (out of discomfort with opponent discomfort, rather than frustration).
Has anyone had the experience of playing several games with no improvement? On the last online game I played, the person I played against paused to ask me if I understood the rules. The next question was, 'do you understand that you're supposed to surround my stones?' or something like that.
I know that I have trouble making any plans spanning several moves, and when I do make 'plans' I can't recall them after activity on another part of the board..
There is a proverb in go: "Lose your 100 first games as fast as possible", mostly because there is little use in making plans before you have some sort of intuition of what's going on on the board. So if you just play and lose without thinking too much about it, you get to the fun part faster.
Nice quote. My interest in playing Go has been rekindled, thank you, and I agree with Relsqui that it applies to many contexts.
Thank you, I've been trying to remember the actual wording of that proverb. A Go player told it to me years ago and it's nice to remember whenever I'm new to, and sucking at, anything. "This is a necessary frustrating hard part; keep going and you'll move through it."
Sure, every Go player hits a plateau in their playing career, in fact more than one.
As a proto-Go player (and I think of myself as a dabbler still), I used to have a specific computer program as my sole opponent: IgoWin, a tiny 9x9 Go program which I still think makes a pretty good introduction to the game.
When you start out as a total beginner IgoWin gives you 5 handicap stones, which on a 9x9 board makes for a real easy games. Then, as is traditional, every time you win a game it takes away one handicap stone, until the games start to become challenging again.
My first ever plateau in learning Go was when I got IgoWin to play me even, taking Black. As White I was totally unable to beat it. No matter how much I played (for weeks on end) I couldn't figure out how to get past that.
After a while I broke down and asked a friend of mine who I knew was a player to teach me the basics. Two or three games with him on a 13x13 board later, I was able to clobber IgoWin as White in even games. I started playing human opponents exclusively, and later learned that bots like IgoWin are considered a bad way to learn, because Go playing programs so lack an understanding of the game that playing them will give you bad habits.
So the idea is that there are plateaus, but there are also plateau-busters. For me, playing with a "real" opponent who knew what he was doing was one. Another was reading in-depth reviews of games at the GTL. Yet another was to do lots of tsumego from graded problems books. Also, reading important books like In the Beginning or Attack and Defence, which help make sense of the whole game and give you a conceptual framework in which to plan your moves.
Thank you. Since I'm embarassed about wasting the time of real people (though I've read I shouldn't be), I think playing a computer is for me.
Even if I learn bad habits, it'll be a way to 'get through' my first 100 games. From playing one online computer game of Go, I find that I enjoy playing and losing to a computer because I know the computer is infinitely patient and doesn't analyze my mistakes or wonder what I'm thinking about for so long.
So my question is; did you find that the experience you gained from the computer outweighed any bad habits you learned, or would it have been preferable to meet with your friend right at the beginning?
I definitely got over my bad habits pretty fast. I think I did, anyway.
My mistake was definitely using the full board.
I would try playing as much as possible on KGS, using 9x9s and 13x13s in the beginner room. Just try to get a feel for (and understand) common patterns. People are quite friendly and willing to do reviews.
Personally, I think 9x9s and Igowin are just boring, and don't teach you much. So try to get past this. Lots of the fun in Go is trying to implement new ideas. 9x9s are generally too constrained for this.
I have dedicated much of my life for overcoming akrasia, especially after I found LW I've been working hard(well, thinking hard and planning hard mostly), does that count as learning?
More details? I may try to replicate this.
It might. The difference between that and Go seems intuitively large, but I can't properly articulate why.