I’ve been using AI to review my games for a while, but how do you personally use AI to learn?
I’ve found it really helpful in strengthening my joseki as well as general game-sense/intuition. Re-training myself on which moves feel correct.
One weird result has been that a lot of my intuitions that I used to brush away in favor of moves that I felt were more big-brained, turned out to be the moves that the AI prefers. So I’m having to work through when I’m overthinking moves.
The main problem I find is that it is so much better than I am that I can’t understand the logic sometimes - so I walk away with “Well, that move was just better, I guess” and fail to get a good understanding.
A bit late, but might as well reply anyway. It’s been a while since I played much, but when I used AI to train, that “main problem” came up a lot for me too. For me, one of the key things in using AI to review is to “play” against the AI, like when you want to explore a tesuji it comes up with, try to read to think of possible follow-ups before you even click the board, so it can’t show you the continuation. It’s the same idea as a tsumego, if you just click without thinking it’s much harder to come away with more understanding.
But a lot of the “ideas” the AIs have, especially in complicated fights, are just past my understanding too but that’s okay! It also might be that the move the AI prefers the most isn’t the best move to play at your/my level. To exaggerate a bit, if a specific attack gains 1/2 of a point but you have to read a 20-move-deep sequence in order to play it or your group could die, you obviously can’t play it if you don’t understand.
I’ve used the AI to refute or confirm ideas I’ve had myself, to train myself on fuseki/joseki and game direction, and for moves the AI thinks are great that I’ve missed, I try to explore why that might be. But I don’t worry about the times I just don’t understand why a move is better if I can’t figure it out, as long as I come away from the review with some greater understanding, it’s a success! (and maybe it’ll be time to understand that idea later, when I’ve improved)
One thing AI has taught me is that it’s not really about the specific move (unless it’s life and death), but about direction. Almost always playing roughly in the correct direction results in +/- 2 point changes at best, whereas wrong direction, even if it’s locally good can easily cost you 5-10 points. It really helped me stop fussing over the “correct sequence”/joseki/fuseki and focus on mistakes that were actually costing me the games.
For training my intuition I find replaying/memorizing pro games is still far more effective, since the moves follow human reasoning and shapes. AI seems to work best as a review tool for finding/exploring mistakes.
That is a really good insight. For me, similarly, it has taught me to play more directly (and ignore “correct sequence”)
