When I was eight years old, my father taught me to play Go. My father is terrible at Go, probably the worst player I've ever played. So, I entered college thinking I was fairly good.
I got completely, embarrassingly, destroyed in my first game. And the next two.
After that, I read a book on it, probably the same one the author read (Learn to Play Go by Janice Kim) and didn't really follow at all. Still getting destroyed.
Then I did what the author didn't do: I played at least twenty games of Go a day. I played a Windows program called Igowin, I played a really bad Palm app while standing in lines or on the bus, I played GNU Go on my laptop.
At first I lost every time, then about half the time, then almost never, at which point I played a human again.
And got destroyed, because I had learned tricks to beat the computer, rather than actual good Go techniques.
I guess my point is that this taught me two things: when learning something, there is no substitute for doing it twenty times a day; and that no matter how much you think you have Go figured out, you probably don't.
I got completely, embarrassingly, destroyed in my first game. And the next two.
After that, I read a book on it, probably the same one the author read (Learn to Play Go by Janice Kim) and didn't really follow at all. Still getting destroyed.
Then I did what the author didn't do: I played at least twenty games of Go a day. I played a Windows program called Igowin, I played a really bad Palm app while standing in lines or on the bus, I played GNU Go on my laptop.
At first I lost every time, then about half the time, then almost never, at which point I played a human again.
And got destroyed, because I had learned tricks to beat the computer, rather than actual good Go techniques.
I guess my point is that this taught me two things: when learning something, there is no substitute for doing it twenty times a day; and that no matter how much you think you have Go figured out, you probably don't.