What is the impact of trying manego against a skilled opponent? Would it be correct to say that by simply telling someone the above strategy, you have significantly increased their skill level, even if they still get beaten by good players?
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.
What is the impact of trying manego against a skilled opponent? Would it be correct to say that by simply telling someone the above strategy, you have significantly increased their skill level, even if they still get beaten by good players?
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.