Given my Go knowledge I’m not sure that the amount of games matters. Part of what playing go is about is reading the variable tree. I don’t think there’s significantly more learning by playing 10 games in four hours than by playing one game in the same timeframe.
You make an assumption that the only activities that humans use when learning go is either playing go or reading about playing go. I don’t think that’s correct. A lot of what training to be a high level go player is about is solving go problems. I remember reading that some professional players have solved all published go problems.
Knowledge also gets passed from player to player by discussing games together which is an activity that also includes reading out positions.
I haven’t played that much Go but this is very much correct for every other board or card game I know. Number of games doesn’t matter much for making a human good, and number of games across humans means basically nothing. What matters, once you’ve played enough to get ‘a handle’ on things and give you enough food for further thought, is analysis, work, deliberate practice.
Thanks for the context, I’ve not played any significant go myself.
Would I be right to lump both solving go problems and discussing games in the knowledge transfer portion of equation. Solving go problems are a form of knowledge transfer, I assume because experienced go players think they will be salient for solving problems in go generally.
Okay so I think we can classify two types of behaviour, directly playing the game and other knowledge transfer (e.g. doing puzzles that people think are salient to the game, reading about strategies or discussing a particular interesting game; all these are done because other people good at the game thought they might be useful for other people to do).
The exact number of games might not be the important part, but I imagine experience is somewhat proportional to playing games. I’d be surprised if you could play no games and just do the knowledge transfer stuff, or only play one game and spend a long time thinking about it. I’m assuming different games will teach you (and humanity if you codify/spread your knowledge) about different parts of the game space.
Alpha Go Zero got better than humanity just by doing the first. I think it would help our predictions about foom if we could look to see how much direct interaction is important vs knowledge transfer in humans for different skills.
Given my Go knowledge I’m not sure that the amount of games matters. Part of what playing go is about is reading the variable tree. I don’t think there’s significantly more learning by playing 10 games in four hours than by playing one game in the same timeframe.
You make an assumption that the only activities that humans use when learning go is either playing go or reading about playing go. I don’t think that’s correct. A lot of what training to be a high level go player is about is solving go problems. I remember reading that some professional players have solved all published go problems.
Knowledge also gets passed from player to player by discussing games together which is an activity that also includes reading out positions.
I haven’t played that much Go but this is very much correct for every other board or card game I know. Number of games doesn’t matter much for making a human good, and number of games across humans means basically nothing. What matters, once you’ve played enough to get ‘a handle’ on things and give you enough food for further thought, is analysis, work, deliberate practice.
Thanks for the context, I’ve not played any significant go myself.
Would I be right to lump both solving go problems and discussing games in the knowledge transfer portion of equation. Solving go problems are a form of knowledge transfer, I assume because experienced go players think they will be salient for solving problems in go generally.
Okay so I think we can classify two types of behaviour, directly playing the game and other knowledge transfer (e.g. doing puzzles that people think are salient to the game, reading about strategies or discussing a particular interesting game; all these are done because other people good at the game thought they might be useful for other people to do).
The exact number of games might not be the important part, but I imagine experience is somewhat proportional to playing games. I’d be surprised if you could play no games and just do the knowledge transfer stuff, or only play one game and spend a long time thinking about it. I’m assuming different games will teach you (and humanity if you codify/spread your knowledge) about different parts of the game space.
Alpha Go Zero got better than humanity just by doing the first. I think it would help our predictions about foom if we could look to see how much direct interaction is important vs knowledge transfer in humans for different skills.