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May 13th, 2005

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Hiraki Mori’s Interactive Way To Go

Hugo sent in a link to Hiraki Mori’s The Interactive Way to Go. This is a very good site for beginners, taking you through a pretty thorough, but interactive introduction to the game. The author says his mission is to take you “from 50 kyu to 30 kyu”, but there’s a lot of material covered on the site that would be valuable for almost every player in our club below 20 kyu (and even a few things for some even stronger than that).

Note that the site does need Java, but that’s to provide the interactive aspect. Many of the examples are of the “try until you get it right”-variety (although you can skip them), which, while frustrating, is often more rewarding when you achieve success.

A link to the page has also been added to the Beginner Resources section.

Posted by Steve in Links

3 Comments »

This entry was posted on Friday, May 13th, 2005 at 11:37 am and is filed under Links. You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

3 Responses to “Hiraki Mori’s Interactive Way To Go”

  1. Hugo says:

    Regarding teaching people, I have heard people recommend Atari Go (the Capture Game), but also criticism that it causes people to focus too much on capturing. Maybe we should consider Stone Counting As Teaching Method (link to Sensei’s Library).

    Anyway, the Interactive Way To Go makes either of these ideas a moot point, it teaches everything and more that any 30kyu player should know.

    May 14th, 2005 at 7:19 pm
  2. Steve says:

    This doesn’t make the point moot – we have still got members who don’t have net access, or who don’t play much Go except at the club. And a major source of our players is likely to remain those walking by and saying “hmm, what’s this here, then? Can you eat the pieces?”. The club must be able to teach these people in a way that they might come back next week.

    There is a lot of philosophical arguments on the Go forums (eg Sensei’s Library) about which method of teaching Go is the best. Our biggest quandary at Stellenbosch is that our players have been taught as beginners in various ways, varying from self-taught, stone counting, atari-go, being thrown in the deep-end on either a 9×9, 13×13, or 19×19 board, and others, probably. Since all of these methods seem to have worked to some degree, its difficult to say which method is best.

    What I feel *is* important though, is that everyone who does teach at the club, should use the same method, since that means someone whose had the basics explained last week can come back and someone else can pick up where the explanation/teaching left off. This is really difficult when each player wants to explain it his own way.

    The advantage of using atari-Go, in my opinion is that explaining it avoids referring to any strategy in the game. Beginners are often, in my experience, put off the game by too much strategic information at the beginning, as they find it bewildering. If you’re playing more than atari-Go to start, many more experienced players will provide hints, thinking they’re being helpful, but quite possibly confusing the beginner. The Atari-Go and Capture-3 method is all about developing the obvious implications of the rules for yourself. Takes a while, but once you have it, you *really* understand it.

    (I don’t have anything against Stone Counting, except we’d have to show everyone how to teach using it again).

    May 16th, 2005 at 10:03 am
  3. Hugo says:

    Understood and agreed. The suggestion I have also seen was to let them play Atari-Go, with the extra hint that they should focus more on making their own stones safe than on killing the opponent’s stones. I suppose this way they will reach the “stale-mate” of no captures quicker, and thereby hopefully learn faster. Who knows.

    I agree there’s not much point in debating this, and that the hints and suggestions should be limited to avoid information overload and thereby loss of interest.

    For my own friends, that I teach in res, I suppose it therefore doesn’t matter as much. I find many people that are eager to learn, and will be more likely to become disinterested if they don’t learn quickly. They luckily have internet access though, so for such cases I now feel the easiest is to point them all at the site, instead of continually being worried I’m overloading them with info, and being of two minds about how much info they really need. (They do ask for it, I don’t just bombard them. 😉

    Being indecisive about what you tell them is of course much worse than merely overloading them, methinks.

    I’m now finished with this topic, no more comments from me. 😉

    May 16th, 2005 at 5:07 pm

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