The relevance of GCS to the strong amateur player

If you are strong amateur player but are fortunate enough to play even stronger players, you might like to consider using GCS in order to simplify your games and generally enable you to play more consistently. GCS is particularily effective against professional players who otherwise tend to dominate amateurs by using a much greater depth of knowledge.

Even if you do not get to play stronger opposition on a regular basis, you may be interested in new ideas with the possibility that you might find some element with which to modify your own. Unfortunately GCS is very much an all or nothing affair and it is unlikely that, at this late stage, you will want to adopt a completely different style of play. However, you may be interested in helping kyu level players to become stronger, and hence might like to consider adopting GCS for teaching purposes. If so, you will probably judge the suitability of GCS by two main criteria. First, would it be more effective than the informal methods you currently use? Second, would GCS live up to the claim of being effective at higher levels of skill?

GCS is actually a spin-off from a study of over a decade by the author into the cognitive processes that humans of varying levels of skill employ when playing go. One of the aims was to discover if it was possible to accurately detect the strength of any player purely from objective analysis of their play (in particular by classifying their mistakes). Not only did this prove to be the case, but it was also discovered that certain features of play separated out those players who were stuck on a specific performance plateau. For example, the percentage of moves in recorded games, judged by strong players to be aji keshi, was far higher in players stuck at around the 5kyu mark, than for any other group. From the same study, it was possible to discern many defects in play which seem to be caused by inadequate teaching. For example, a player, having many times experienced his stones being captured, may seek and receive advice on how to make a second eye in tight positions. However improving his skill in this respect may encourage him to play even more isolated stones than before, whereas the lack of connectivity is the more fundamental concern.

As an expert player, you may believe that you explicitly know how you play and all you have to do is convey this to the weaker player. But it has long be accepted by researchers in the field of artificial intelligence, that it is exceedingly rare for any person to be able to explicitly define what it is that makes them an expert. The mass of evidence indicates that casual advice, even from an expert, at best, makes little difference. For go, the main factor determining the rate of improvement is good access to playing stronger players. It seems that beginners improve regardless of advice, not because of it. However, even with access to stronger players, the rate of improvement can be very slow.

As with many other subjects, perhaps what is needed is a reductive formal system, which would allow the beginner to grasp concepts that illuminate his own empirical attempts. The go material originated from the East is not organised for this purpose. It provides many examples from the games of 9dan professionals which are difficult to reduce to principles applicable to the student's own efforts at play. Unfortunately, the somewhat limited material written by occidentals has either copied the oriental philosophy, or coined simplistic concepts, or has otherwise tackled only a small portion of the problem. GCS attempts to remedy the situation by narrowing down the context of full-board play so that the beginner can more readily understand the impact of his moves. Combined with interactive tutorial/problem material this approach appears to be very effective!

Whereas the reductive nature of GCS might be accepted as a useful teaching step, an experienced player will intuitively feel that no simple system could possibly cope with the complexities of go at higher levels of skill, and so perhaps will not feel able to recommend GCS to the beginner. However, the elements of GCS, although carefully crafted to be easy to understand in simple contexts, are, by using concepts such as notional links, powerful enough to express advanced play, albeit restricted in options. This has been tested out at amateur 5dan level by attempting to find circumstances in trial games where following GCS leads to an inferior play, even by the slightest degree. This is judged at each and every move of the game with one side consistently playing to GCS. (Note that playing to other than GCS and then swapping to GCS halfway through a game definitely is inferior!). So far, in the rare cases when it is has been thought that such an inferior move has been found, further investigation has always discovered that the situation can be remedied by playing a different, better, GCS move earlier on in the sequence. This does not mean that there are no circumstances where GCS might force a clearly sub-standard move. It is logically impossible to disprove this possibility. But the reader should be reassured that, if they do occur, degraded moves seem statistically rare, at least at amateur 5dan level.