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A few random comparisons from a go player here. Any professional go player can remember their own games as matter of course. They also replay hundreds of pro g
by nandemo 17y ago
A few random comparisons from a go player here.
Any professional go player can remember their own games as matter of course. They also replay hundreds of pro games for study, thereby memorizing them. I'd be surprised if it were any different for chess players.
In fact, even amateur low-dan -- advanced but far from professional level -- players can replay games they have played in the same day, and can memorize a few games with some practice.
Go games often last more than 200 moves but players memorize sequences, not isolated moves.
Pros can routinely read 50+ moves ahead but, as tsipiteri mentioned, the hardest part is evaluating the positions.
While there is no single "world" pro championship, a couple of Korean teenagers have won prestigious international titles. A 19-year-old who's "merely" a contender wouldn't be called a prodigy in the go world. I guess Asian go players just train more and are more competitive than chess players. Unlike Carlsen, they don't usually care about a life besides their game.
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- dgordon 17y agoSomehow go always makes its way into online conversations about chess. The Wikipedia article on computer go suggests that humans are better at calculating long sequences in go than in chess because the pieces in go stay where they are unless they're captured. This seems reasonable to me, though I'm no better than a beginner at go (I'm probably around the equivalent to an "amateur low dan" at chess, and can do what you suggested a go player of that level should be able to do in replaying and memorizing games.) Also, it's not really fair to compare international titles in go, of which several are contested every year, to the world championship in chess, which is only contested every other year. A better comparison might be some of the major international tournaments like Wijk aan Zee, Linares...or perhaps this year's Nanjing Pearl Spring tournament, in which Carlsen decisively defeated a field consisting of five other top-20 players: Veselin Topalov (currently world #2, and the challenger for the world championship to be held later this year), Wang Yue (#9), Peter Leko (#12), Teimour Radjabov (#16), and Dmitry Jakovenko (#19). Carlsen scored 8/10 (six wins, four draws) -- no one else scored above 5.5/10.