Rationality Lessons in the Game of Go

One of the things I like best about Go is the lessons it teaches about reductionism vs holism. Success at Go requires the ability to think at several levels simultaneously. A play may be motivated by tactical considerations or by strategic considerations, or most likely by both. A well played game is frequently attracted toward a state with some similarities to what the chaos-theory-geeks call "self organized criticality", in that structures at all levels of organization become equally important.

I would also add something about "guessing the teacher's password".

If you do things you saw a stronger player do, but don't understand them, you will sooner or later be punished - either because you applied the move in a situation where it doesn't work; or because you don't know how to continue.

I don't doubt that there are lots of rationality lessons in deterministic games like Go. But I think in some ways they crucially misrepresent life. When you've lost a game in Go you can always think:

"I lost because I didn't play well enough."

In games with a random element, like poker, you have to think:

"I lost because I didn't play well enough AND/OR because I was unlucky."

To become good at poker it's crucial to be able to distinguish between bad luck and play mistakes. You have to keep your cool when your opponent makes bad moves and wins anyway. You have to be able to think thoughts like this:

"That the card on top of the deck should have happened to be the only one that would let my opponent win the game is not evidence I should update on. It tells me nothing I didn't already know. It's just that Nature felt like slapping me in the face right now and there's nothing I can do about it. She'll wipe the grin off my opponent soon enough if he keeps playing like that."

In life, we are very often faced with situations where we have to analyze to what extent something is the result of our own actions and to what extent it is the result of factors outside our control.

I think you should link to some learning resources about go in your article, for people who want to start.

Rules tutorial

KGS Go Server

Sensei's Library - wiki

Go Problems

Sorry for all the comments, I thought of some more things:

The "dark side" has an analogy in go. It is tempting to play moves that you know don't work because you think your opponent won't be able to figure out the correct response. It is usually not obvious to beginners that doing this is really holding them back.

I commonly hear beginners justify a move with the reasoning, "I played X because next I can play Y!" To which the response is, "But after you play X it's your opponent's turn. And he is not stupid and will prevent Y." Is there a fallacy this is analogous to? This reasoning is so widespread (there are more subtle forms) that one pro has said that the most important rule in the game is that black and white take turns playing.

In a thread on Reddit about coping with the fear of death I suggestlearning to play Go and playing in tournaments (for the timed matches) as a way of getting used to managing a limited stock of time.

Robin Hanson ponders trying to stick to clear, simple methods of rationality in the hope of avoiding judgment and the biases inherent in the exercise of judgment. I comment that this has worked poorly for me and Go with the implication that it is likely to work poorly in real life because real life has even more of the nasty complication than Go.

Is it true that all of these points could be said for any goal-centered action, such as making paperclips? Or for any game? How is Go different that those other games and tasks with respect to these lessons and insights?

Thank you for writing this article.

If I can add one thing: A game of go is very long, often 250+ moves. Mistakes you make early on might take 50 or 100 moves before you start to feel their effects. As such, the game encourages long-term thinking. If you are rushing around putting out fires all over the board, you are not winning. I often find myself wishing I could teach my company's management go for this reason.

Go really does reward rational thinking. Games I play by feel and intuition are fun, but if I take my time and try to make rational decisions at each point I play much better.

For me, Go helped to highlight certain temptations to behave irrationally, which I think can carry over to real life.

One was the temptation to avoid thinking about parts of the board where I'd recently made a mistake.

And if I played a poor move and my opponent immediately refuted it, there was a temptation to try to avoid seeming foolish by dreaming up some unlikely scheme I might have had which would have made the exchange part of the plan.

The lesson I learned most effectively from Go was to acknowledge mistakes; when I was a weak player one of my worst faults was being unwilling to admit to my opponent that they had outplayed me. This is particularly clear when compared to chess.

In chess, if you fall behind in material or tempo the correct thing (in my experience; I am a weak chess player) is almost always to see what you gained in exchange and try to exploit that. If you gained nothing in exchange and the loss was significant, your play is typically irrelevant because you lost. This encourages you to search for justifications for your moves: I lost that piece as part of this attack, or that sacrifice improved my position in this way, or so forth.

In contrast, if you are outplayed in Go the correct thing (in my experience; I am about 10k, which is slightly better than I am at chess but still quite weak) is almost always to recognize that you have been outplayed. My original problem was to reason, "If I cannot beat my opponent in this fight, then he is better than me" and then continue a lost fight, or perhaps to assume that the stones would eventually serve some other function (which they typically would not). Eventually I realized that a game of Go consists of many fights, and that you are severely handicapping yourself if you lose the game whenever one of them goes badly. Sometimes, even in deterministic games of perfect information, you will win most but not all fights. The only way I can now win games is by frequently recognizing that my previous moves were errors and abandoning whatever rationalization for those moves I may be tempted to construct.

The difficulty of internalizing this lesson leads me to suspect that I make the same mistake in my life. I am constantly tempted to justify my decisions; the temptation is even greater when I am forced to justify myself to people around me, and the only alternative is to explicitly admit that I made a mistake.

Two quick comments:

The main aspect to understand for this article is that go is a game of territory.

This was interesting to me, because one of my 'viewquakes' for Go is that it's NOT a game of territory. It's more about the strength, flow, and structure of stones. I hit this around 8kyu while stuck. Territory is just a side-effect and the Japanese standard of measurement (it may be surprising to learn that there are several scoring methods, and they don't significantly change the character of the game).

The other lesson I can think of is that Go taught me viscerally that the small differences matter immensely performance-wise (I tend to like the idea that, with a small set of principles you can derive whatever you need). Janice Kim writes that learning about good shape gives you about 80% of the strength of professional players, but I couldn't even break the 10kyu barrier with just that. Or was it 15kyu? I don't remember.

I find the concept of "aji" especially fascinating when it comes to Go. The word means roughly translated means something like "taste", and as a go concept it refers to set of possible moves and continuations that can dramatically alter the local situation. For example, if there is a weakness in the opponent formation somewhere on the board because of the mistake opponent just made, but the opponent is able to somehow defend it under direct attack, I would most likely play away from this weakness for now, and try to steer the game so that the aji surrounding that weakness could be used as much as possible.

If the weakness was a possibility of a cut, which would totally work if you could get move A, an influential move that looks at the center of the board and works fine for you, instead of reaping the benefits straight away(playing A so now you got a nice influential move while opponent has to protect), you'd most likely want to go and start a running fight elsewhere on the board, and try to steer the fight so that A becomes a crucial move in it, so then opponent would face a choice, protect the original weakness, the possibility of a cut, or protect this new running group.

Leaving aji open and trying to get as much out of it as possible is, for me, the core of the game, but unfortunately I can't see any equivalent in rationality directly. Anyone else, any ideas?

I once read something on LessWrong which was later labeled The Fundamental Question of rationality: "What do you believe, and why do you believe it?" I have found this useful to adapt to go: when playing, I constantly ask myself, "Are these stones alive or dead, and how do I know that?"

I found it really important to start asking myself a bit broader question, "where do I want to play, and why do I want to play there". If, say, my answer is something like "To prepare the move X", it makes it quite straightforward to play X straight ahead, if it's any good.

"Overconfidence leads to bad play."

As an avid chess player, I can tell you that this is true in chess as well. People look at brilliant sacrifices by grandmasters (Bobby Fischer was famous for this) and think they are brilliant enough to pull off the same thing. In my experience, 80-90% of material sacrifices fail. When they do succeed, it is usually because the sacrificer is considerably better than her opponent. I've learned to subdue my desire for a sacrifice and a quick strike and work on a longterm plan instead.

• Go and chess provide clear demonstrations of opportunity cost, the first-mover advantage (esp. go), and the importance of not wasting time on trivial moves.

• Go provides proof of, and some understanding of, the power of human intuition. My dad can make moves that I don't think he knows the reasons for, that turn out to have amazing consequences 10 moves later when I discover eg. that a group of stones of mine is dead because, even though I have more liberties in that group than he has in his attacking group, he can use his liberties while I can't use mine due to side-effects of those moves. But one is not inclined to view this as mystical intuition; it's patterns in the stones that his unconscious learned to recognize without his conscious mind knowing why.

• Small advantages escalate. In chess, at the start of the game I might focus on trying to force my opponent to take a move back, or to trade a piece I haven't moved for a piece he has moved. Once that's done, I take advantage of my increased deployment to try to make an otherwise-even trade that disrupts his pawn structure. Once that's done, I try to take the isolated pawn. Once I'm a pawn ahead (I know then that I'll probably win) I force trades to make that advantage larger. I don't know if this works in real life.

As some commenters have mentioned, we should be able to derive lessons of rationality from any game (such as Backgammon or Chess), not just Go. After all, rationalists should win, so whatever helps us be rational will help as win, at games as at life.

However, just because being rational helps with the game, that doesn't mean that students of the game will learn this. (After all, being rational helps with real life, yet many students of real life miss these lessons entirely!) Each game (at least each that has long been widely played) has its own literature and tradition of strategy with maxims and advice, and this is what students will learn.

Now, Go is so simple in principle that one quickly gets past advice which is specific to the game and into advice that applies more widely. So we actually have literature, written by specialists in a game rather than in rationality, that stresses (for example) the importance of accurate beliefs. And so players actually learn this lesson.

(To see if Go is really special in this regard, we'd have to actually check the literature of other games. Don't trust my just-so story about how Go's rules are simple, etc; that's unsupported twaddle.)

Comment to 7: Important in Go, as in real life, is that taking the most recent change way more into account than reasonable is very easy to happen, and most times a very bad thing to do. (I think this may not be clear for non-players from the description.)

Beginners (that includes me) usually have a model of the game, see the opponent's move, and concentrate 90% (or more) of their thinking time a few points around the move. It's similar to the priming problem, and it's similar to how our emotional state is influenced by things that just happened, whereas everything in the past gets more and more muddled up.

And I'm too lazy to pull out the corresponding links.

Interesting article!

I think you're overstating the difficulty of Go to computers. The latest wave of Monte Carlo programs -- when run on fast multicore machines -- are able to beat professionals with a modicum of handicap on 19x19, or at even games on 9x9; they're certainly now better than the average club player.

The position in Figure 3 looks alive to me. One eye in the center, and miai for eyes at the two points diagonally below.

Related article: "The benefits of the Japanese game of Go"

...and book: "The Way of Go: 8 Ancient Strategy Secrets for Success in Business and Life"

Go teaches: don't always respond to what your opponent does. Instead, survey the situation and make the best move.

I was quite pleased to see that an article had been written on Go's effect on rational thinking. It's a subject I had been thinking about quite a bit recently. #3 and #4 are the most relevant to my experience of Go and it's effect on my level of rational thinking in general. After playing Go for quite a while, I noticed that it promotes a sort of soft game/decision theoretic strategy to approaching everyday problems and more importantly it makes that approach feel natural. The equilibrium position becomes the natural one.

An additional benefit to playing go, especially on an online server that shows a detailed plot of your rank (as KGS does, for example), is that you can use it as a proxy for brain function when you are doing self-experimentation. I mean, it's rather more fun to play go than to time yourself solving simple arithmetic problems (Seth Roberts' method for measuring mental performance). For example, I noticed a marked increase in performance after I started standing up for most of my workday. More obviously, I lost a stone during a time when I was exhausting myself by working 7 days a week.

Another point for me is that what is happening on the board isn't the only thing one can use to train oneself. I rarely run out of time playing go; on the other hand I have been known to lose the occasional game because I got caught up in the action and forgot to stop and consider the whole-board position carefully enough, not because I wasn't thinking strategically, but because I was playing on momentum. Properly pacing oneself, and mastering one's adrenaline response, are also things one can practice at the goban.

ps. I am 4 kyu on KGS if others are still looking for fellow Lesswrongers to play with.

I find backgammon to also be a good analogy for life in general, though I don't really have the time to get into all of the details... perhaps the most important lesson, though, is that if you always take the "safest" move, you're almost guaranteed to lose! You need to take risks - smart risks, where the payoff is worth the danger and the danger is non-fatal, but risks nonetheless.

And sometimes, even if you do everything right, you still lose. That's life.

Go teaches: behave differently when you are winning - don't take risks, consolidate, play conservatively. Also, to figure out how you are doing - so you can adjust accordingly.

On the other hand, there are some ways of thinking which are useful for Go but not for real life. One example is that damaging my opponent is as good as working for myself.

Another example is that, between equal players, the sunk costs fallacy is sometimes sound reasoning in Go. One form is "if I don't achieve goal X I've lost the game anyway, so I might as well continue trying even though it's looking unlikely". Another form (for stronger players than me) is "if I play A, I will get a result that's two points worse than I could have had if I played B earlier, so I can rule A out."

Lately I've been looking into various board games (in a broad sense--there doesn't have to be a board) that are good practice for good thinking. Anybody here have any recommendations?

It would be interesting to know if people have learned anything about resigning from go.

Go teaches: prioritisation and time management skills.

Go teaches: hide your thoughts from your opponent - control your speech and body language.

IMO, there's a lesson in the Japanese rules of go. These have complications that lead to a shorter game. I think the lesson here is: don't adopt other people's culture and then start making changes before you have understood it all properly.

Go teaches: trade! If you gain points while threatening one group, and your opponent responds by gaining points while threatening another one, sometimes trading one group for the other one is the best thing to do.

What's your playing strength in Go? The article reads a bit like it's either too much targeted at people without understanding of go or is written without by someone with a playing strength >5 kyu?

But if the two players disagree, the solution is simply to resume play. That true for some Go rule sets but it isn't true for Japanese style rules.

I'm 1 kyu.

Awesome, I've voted it up simply for bringing this subject to LW. I've always wanted to learn about Go. I've already got a book, but what I'm missing is someone/thing I can play with. I know computers are no good at Go yet, but I wonder if there are programs for beginners to play against before bothering humans with their lack of sophistication? I'll have to check out the link provided in the OP. Thank you.

Don't attack strength You don't try to kill every stone of your opponent. You only need a few points more in the end than your opponent. In discussions that translates into accepting some premises of your opponent for the sake of the argument.

Take the evolution debate. You probably won't convince a hard core Christian that God doesn't exist. If you however admit God's existence for the sake of the argument you can use it to make strong arguments:

The bible shows that God prefers evolutionary design over intelligent design. God ordered a flood to kill the majority of the human race because he selected some humans as having better traits then the other humans. God choose the Jewish people and ordered them to commit genocide on other human groups that he didn't like.

Seeing God's genocidal ambitions as his attempt of evolutionary design. Otherwise the morality of killing that many people is hard to explain and the Christian you are arguing with has the burden of providing a better justification for God's attempt at genocide.