Excerpts

Part of a response to my father, when he asserted that there is a hard cap on everyone's innate ability to do something as a reason for why he doesn't feel like working on improving his go playing in order to keep up with me:

I think you will never know how good you are capable of getting if you stop working on it, though. If you don't really know what 10k even feels like, how can you say that you don't think you'd be any better? The way I see it, I know what 7k is right now, and I know what I have to work on to get to 6k. When I reach 6k, I might know what I need to get to 5k. I can keep inching forward until I get to a point where I no longer know how to proceed. I reached this point a few years ago, around 14k, and thought I was basically done improving, but after some time to back off and start with a fresh approach, I've started improving again. I think I can keep doing this basically indefinitely; the only limiting factor for your skill is where you choose to stop improving. So, if you think you've reached that point, then you really will never get better. But there's no harm in staying at that level and working on it anyway, right?

Sometimes I underestimate my own capability for nauseating optimism and resisting fatalism.

Permalink
18 March 2014 12:27

Go ramblings

During my teenage years, my father and I played somewhere between 1-3 games of go every day in the summers. This meant that we both got to play a lot of games, but also that we were playing the games against the same person, thus neither of us improved. Slowly, over time, we became the same player, and the summer we realised we were just playing essentially the same game over and over again was, coincidentally, the summer we had the most strained relationship.

I moved away for college, during which I didn't play much go, nor did I communicate much with my father. When I returned and we had our first game after our long hiatus, I slaughtered him easily. I'd like to think that he realised that I learned things he couldn't possibly have taught me, and that if he were to keep up, he'd have to learn things on his own as well. However, I cannot get into someone else's head, and the emotional constraints of that situation means I'll probably never know.

In any event, I've started playing again, and learning, and reading, and playing. I don't think I'll ever be a dan-level player, but for the first time in years, I have something to work on in my go.

Permalink
20 September 2013 00:45