Given all the interest in sudden interest in go in this thread, anyone have a sure-fire method to improve at go from double-digit kyu to single-digit kyu and amateur dan level?
Handicap Go by Nagahara Yoshiaki helped me tremendously.
I started playing I believe in March of 2025. I had the very good luck that one of my high school best friends is a 4 dan EGF player, and was in the French team 20 years ago. We played constantly against each other with 9 stones handicap and him teaching me a lot.
But when I read that book, in a few weeks/months we went from 9 stones to only 3 stones by August 2025. and we have stayed at 3 stones since, playing very even games, with only a handful or couple of points differences. Only very recently did I win by 9.5 points. Which made me hope I had made new progress, but I had to resign in the very next game.
At double-digit kyu level, you should just play every day until you feel you are stuck.
After you get stuck, you should pick one thing at a time to focus on improving. But the one thing should probably be related to tesuji or life and death.
OGS (online-go.com) is the predominant server for players in the Western hemisphere, and provides a modern browser based UI. Fox has a larger player base, but that player base is almost entirely in Asian timezones. Fox requires downloading a not so modern client whose UI is lacking English translation. I get the feeling that Fox has a lot of bot players in the lower ranks.
It can take a few minutes to get a match on OGS. When that happens, I take the opportunity to warm up with a few tsumego drills on goproblems.com
Probably Fox would be the server with the most players but at DDK basically any would work and I think getting exposure to different playing styles would be worthwhile.
For example, someone on HN said they work out every day, not because they think it will make them super buff, but because they consider it a virtuous thing to do. If they miss a day, they will forgive themselves and try their best to pick it up the next day. They consider doing this virtuous act to be the end in and of itself, while treating any health benefits as a bonus.
I quite like this mental model for some reason I can't quite put my finger on. Maybe it's the similarity to virtue ethics, which was always for elites and I have an elitist streak.
I agree. I had a negative spin on a lot of these. Perhaps the mood I was in. The original idea was more positive, and somehow it went the other way as I wrote it up. When reflecting on that post, the certitude one is the one that bothered me.
I'm wondering if your description could be an example of migrating a goal or practice to a value?
Some of the others have natural pairings too (eg momentum/inertia). Perhaps there's a taxonomy struggling to get out, where there's a bright and dark side to each? Though it kind of depends on the aspect you reflect them on; activation energy's "opposite" could be compound interest or nihilism.
Clearly I need to write a game in the tradition of Ultima IV, where different groups/races/species represent the extreme of each model, and perhaps its reflection....
[1] is a nice intro into what the current scientific consensus in what caused the Bronze Age collapse is, written by historian Bret Devereaux. The view he paints pretty much aligns with what Wilson wrote about there being no such thing as the "sea people".
I've read that article too, and never got the impression it quite went that far. That there wasn't some unified group, sure, but I never heard anyone claim that (maybe reflecting when I first learned about them?). Maybe that's what Wilson meant, but if so it isn't very clear - it sounded to me like she's claiming that all those constituent groups the Egyptians wrote about, that Bret Devereaux touched upon, didn't actually exist (and worse, that this is the consensus position).
Edit: It occured to me, perhaps Wilson is thinking about this subject primarily from the Greek perspective, when most of what we know comes from others.
That article's TL;DR is bad theories "external invasion" and "volcanoes", and sets against it the current historian consensus: "climate" and "internal instability".
> Let's start from the other end. Just a pawn and two kings. It's possible to describe some quite succinct rules for when that's a draw versus a win for the side with the pawn. Agreed? Club players know these by heart. You could write that doen as invariants. As long as the side with the pawn stays inside the "green zone" of the state space, there is nothing the other side can do to void mate.
The flaw in this line of reasoning is that it's easy to come up with a theorem that works for KP vs K. However as the number of pieces increases, it becomes impossible to distill all the branches of possible moves into a simple theorem like that. If what you said were possible, endgame would be a simple flowchart, but look at how much time even GM players use in endgame and how often mistakes are made, and you'll recognize Chess endgame is not distillable into a simple flowchart when there are even as few as 7 pieces on the board.
Given the above, the only option is enumeration, if you want to prove that in all cases the outcome is White win or draw.
Tesla IPO'd at 1.7B and is worth 1.4T today. Giving you the benefit of doubt since it would be closer to a 1000x gain rather than the 100x gain that you didn't buy right at IPO, I will point out that there's a world's difference buying in at 1.7B, because there's still room for the stock to 1000x, but there's not much gain to be had buying in at 1.7T valuation.
Even the most highly company in the world Nvidia is less than 3x that valuation, so it's not a good comparison with Tesla's IPO.
Direct indexing will soon be able to provide that functionality of giving you S&P 500 stocks minus A, B and C companies you don't want to hold. However, cheap and reliable direct indexing brokerages aren't out there yet. Hopefully more competitors show up and help lower the prices for everyone.
This reminded me of those booths they have at company holiday parties where they take a photo of you, convert it to a line drawing and have the robot draw it out for you to keep. Very cool hack!
I had this same feeling. Same with reading a biography of Kurt Vonnegut. Before reading it, I thought of them in idealistic ways. They had multiple affairs and weren't such great people, even though they both wrote really, really well.
reply