Someone good (low kyu or dan level) will eventually play a symmetry-breaking move such as tengen, and then the novice (who doesn’t have a good follow-up because they didn’t really understand the moves they were playing) will get clobbered.
Manego is like guessing the teacher’s password by parroting back every single word the teacher speaks. :) What counts as skill in Go is understanding the moves you play (and being able to read out their consequences).
It does impress novice opponents, which I suppose is why you’d see people not want to keep playing you once they caught on that you were doing it.
I wouldn’t compare it to guessing the teacher’s password, or at least not only compare it to that.
Recall the points made in our discussion of tacit knowledge. Here is a case where a simple verbal instruction, in a significant, measurable way, can increase someone’s skill at a game with notoriously inarticulable strategy.
You explain manego to a beginner. (Not tournament beginner, I mean, someone who knows the rules, read a tutorial, only played a few games.) Now, they can almost always beat a computer[1] as white, when before they could not. You made a huge difference, purely through verbal instruction.
I would say that’s more of a problem with GnuGo than an actual increase in skill. Manego is more of a trick play that only works against people who don’t know how to deal with it.
Someone good (low kyu or dan level) will eventually play a symmetry-breaking move such as tengen, and then the novice (who doesn’t have a good follow-up because they didn’t really understand the moves they were playing) will get clobbered.
Manego is like guessing the teacher’s password by parroting back every single word the teacher speaks. :) What counts as skill in Go is understanding the moves you play (and being able to read out their consequences).
It does impress novice opponents, which I suppose is why you’d see people not want to keep playing you once they caught on that you were doing it.
I wouldn’t compare it to guessing the teacher’s password, or at least not only compare it to that.
Recall the points made in our discussion of tacit knowledge. Here is a case where a simple verbal instruction, in a significant, measurable way, can increase someone’s skill at a game with notoriously inarticulable strategy.
You explain manego to a beginner. (Not tournament beginner, I mean, someone who knows the rules, read a tutorial, only played a few games.) Now, they can almost always beat a computer[1] as white, when before they could not. You made a huge difference, purely through verbal instruction.
I’d say that’s pretty impressive.
[1] I use GnuGo as reference for computer Go.
I would say that’s more of a problem with GnuGo than an actual increase in skill. Manego is more of a trick play that only works against people who don’t know how to deal with it.