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From: vu0112@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu (Cliff Joslyn)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,sci.psychology,rec.games.go
Subject: Thinking during game playing (was Re: language, thought, and culture)
Message-ID: <960@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu>
Date: 18 Mar 88 04:15:52 GMT
References: <7714@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <152@yendor.UUCP>
Reply-To: vu0112@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu (Cliff Joslyn)
Organization: SUNY Binghamton, NY
Lines: 35

[ Do the sci.lang people really want us to go away? We're having so much
fun here. . .]

In article <152@yendor.UUCP> gmg@yendor.UUCP (Gary Godfrey) writes:
>In the past, I've asked several good chess players about how their
>thoughts "work" when playing the game.  Initially they (the three of
>them) all said something to the effect of "the move becomes obvious."
>Then, after I pressed them for a while, I manage to get that they will
>have thoughts like, "what about *this*" where "*this*" can be n number
>of moves in the future.

I'm a serious Go player, and at least at my level (mid- to low-level
ranked ametuer, 5 kyu) my thinking is explicitly visual.  I literally
maintain a picture of a small part of the board (with great detail, or a
more fuzzy picturre of the whole board) in my mind, and literally put
little black and white stones down, and "see" the board in the new
configuration.  Now when I say "I" do this, it's really just below the
level of consciousness.  Consciously, I think "well, if I make that
decision <stone flops down> then what happens <whole bunch of stones
flop down>.  No, that's not what I want, let's try it *that* way
<bactrack; start over with an initial stone flop>" Literally.  I'm
seeing all this. 

There was a stage when I was just getting decent, when I went to bed at
night and literally had hypno-gogic (sp? pre-dream state) visions of
stones dancing around in semi-real patterns (there are certain shapes in
the game that are recurrent).  That stopped, eventuallly.  I feel that
what happened was that I was going through a process of learning to
control this new form of representation, of rules, not the literal rules
of the game, but the figurative rules of how the stones "behave. 

O---------------------------------------------------------------------->
| Cliff Joslyn, Professional Cybernetician 
| Systems Science Department, SUNY Binghamton, New York, but my opinions
| vu0112@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu
V All the world is biscuit shaped. . .