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Topic: a teaching ladder ? (Read 1095 times) |
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chessandgo
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a teaching ladder ?
« on: Jul 18th, 2007, 4:17pm » |
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Hi all,
Do you know about the go teaching ladder ? (http://gtl.xmp.net/) The idea is that anyone can ask there for a review of one of his games by a stronger player, and it's actually a very fine tool to improve at go. Would you folks like that we try the same for arimaa ? Admittedly, we are a lot less numerous than go players, and the "teaching chains" couldn't be as long as for go, but how about trying it ?
Jean
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aaaa
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Re: a teaching ladder ?
« Reply #1 on: Jul 18th, 2007, 4:50pm » |
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Arimaa is way too obscure of a game for such a thing being necessary in lieu of the simple commenting system. The Elephant of Arimaa himself, Fritzlein, already goes so much out of his way to provide detailed commentary (probably to amuse himself, it being lonely at the top).
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chessandgo
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Re: a teaching ladder ?
« Reply #2 on: Jul 18th, 2007, 6:32pm » |
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on Jul 18th, 2007, 4:50pm, aaaa wrote:| Arimaa is way too obscure of a game for such a thing being necessary in lieu of the simple commenting system. The Elephant of Arimaa himself, Fritzlein, already goes so much out of his way to provide detailed commentary (probably to amuse himself, it being lonely at the top). |
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It's true that we already have the "game comments" section, which gives us delight each time Karl writes something in there. But don't you think something more "institutionnal", where a player comments the whole game, specifically for the player(s), might be profitable ? If not, so much for my idea, and I'll wait to have a better one before coming back to bother you in the forum 
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chessandgo
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Re: a teaching ladder ?
« Reply #4 on: Jul 18th, 2007, 6:59pm » |
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well, fragmentation is not necessary, the whole-game comments can be stored in the game comments, in the wiki, or wherever ...
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arimaa_master
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Re: a teaching ladder ?
« Reply #5 on: Jul 19th, 2007, 3:33am » |
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Very interesting Idea - only if someone get enough time to comment the game but I think it could be very useful to both sides.
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| « Last Edit: Jul 19th, 2007, 3:35am by arimaa_master » |
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RonWeasley
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Harry's friend (Arimaa player #441)
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Re: a teaching ladder ?
« Reply #6 on: Jul 19th, 2007, 6:55am » |
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It's not always obvious when somebody wants comments on a game. I think this idea is good in that there would be no doubt.
Then there's the problem of conflicting advice. Even our top players do not always agree, but I think that kind of debate helps everybody. So I like the idea even more.
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chessandgo
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Re: a teaching ladder ?
« Reply #7 on: Jul 19th, 2007, 7:42am » |
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on Jul 19th, 2007, 3:33am, arimaa_master wrote:| Very interesting Idea - only if someone get enough time to comment the game but I think it could be very useful to both sides. |
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you're right, it's quite time consuming to comment a whole game, but it can be even more teaching than reading a comment of your own game 
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JacquesB
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Re: a teaching ladder ?
« Reply #8 on: Jul 19th, 2007, 11:40am » |
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Nice idea! But I am afraid there will be more players like myself who wish to learn from stronger players than those who feel confident enough to teach.
Go is a different story, because there is established knowledge even a 15kyu can teach (a 20 kyu) useful things. And even in go, there is a saying: "Weak players teach bad habits."
I think, if I have improved in Arimaa it is because I am more used to tactical reading and I avoid some dangers I did not see when I started. I have learned to wait, basically. But my strategy is still a pure sketch. I have some beliefs of the type "A is better than B", but they are based on "I once won doing A", "I once lost doing B". But that is not serious! Neither myself nor my opponent played near perfect, so why should I teach someone A is better than B? In this forum the strongest players do not agree on the worth of a hostage, etc.
I feel that I cannot teach anything about Arimaa, but i can teach go (and I am only 4kyu).
An excellent way to learn a game is through problems as in http://www.goproblems.com/ The problems in that site are contributed by voluntary users. But I don't think there are enough Arimaa players for that.
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Fritzlein
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Re: a teaching ladder ?
« Reply #9 on: Jul 20th, 2007, 8:07am » |
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I think a teaching ladder is an excellent idea. It may be true that weaker players can teach bad habits, but I expect they are still teaching something important. For example, when I was rated 2000, I might have taught "never advance any piece except your elephant in the opening". Now I think this is wrong, but I still could have shown someone the value of defensive play, and could have shown some of the techniques of dislodging an enemy piece towards your own home trap, and how to overload the enemy elephant between both of your own home traps, etc. So even though I was wrong in some sense, because I was over-emphasizing something, I could still have been teaching important things to weaker players.
In fact, Omar mentioned to me a while ago that he is very interested in this idea. He thought it would be useful to formalize the mentor/learner relationship. Wouldn't it be fun if I adopted one learner and chessandgo adopted another learner, and then we had a match between the learners to see who was the better mentor?
The only problem I foresee is that the community is still small, too small I am afraid. It isn't even clear we can support one team for a Mob game. I had less time this past week, and the Mob discussion was very thin as a consequence. Will the Mob stay healthy for two years (the probable game length) as people join and drop out? Would there be enough people volunteering as mentors to keep the teaching ladder concept alive, given the way real life takes us more or less away from Arimaa?
I would at least encourage beginners to ask for advice in the game comments. People who have the time and motivation to be teachers will be happy to respond. If someone wants an entire game commented, and someone else has the energy to comment every move, so much the better. We can post it on the Arimaa TWiki for everyone to learn from in the future as well. I learned a great deal from the one game I thoroughly commented, although I haven't since had the motivation to repeat the feat.
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chessandgo
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Re: a teaching ladder ?
« Reply #10 on: Jul 20th, 2007, 11:04am » |
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It would be going even further than a teaching ladder to try the mentor/learner idea you mention, Karl. One advantage of the ladder is that it's more flexible : players just register when they want to be part of it, and then submit games to be commented whenever they want, and are sometimes asked whether they have time to comment a game. The fact that the community is small should not a problem, unless people ask for more game reviews than reviewers can comment, that is to say that the system could crash only if has to much success For the sake of comparison, I've been registered to the go teaching ladder for 1 year and a half I think, and only submitted two games and was asked to comment 4 or 5 games, which is not a heavy load of work for such a long period ...
What we might need is some kind of coodinating structure, to send review request to plausible reviewers when a game is submitted, but as we're very few players, it should not be necessary, and some call in the forum, with maybe the intervention of one coordinator should be enough to find out whether they are available reviewers or not for the game. The other question is where to store the comments, so that people can access the reviewed games easily, but this should not be a problem either ...
A last question is what the "optimal" level difference between the player and the reviewer should be ; in chess, I think around 300 or 400 rating points should be ok, maybe at arimaa 300 should be ok as well ? This would mean that players around 2100 could ask for game review a single player, Karl, but players around 1600 could have the top 30 players as reviewers. So if a non-neglectible fraction of those guys decide to join, the system might work, ain't it ? With the 1500-1600 players teaching the beginners, everyone sould have their share of reviews
on Jul 20th, 2007, 8:07am, Fritzlein wrote: Wouldn't it be fun if I adopted one learner and chessandgo adopted another learner, and then we had a match between the learners to see who was the better mentor?
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This issue has already settled : we had a discussion about it with mdk last night, and voted unanimely that you were the best
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chessandgo
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Arimaa player #1889
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Re: a teaching ladder ?
« Reply #11 on: Jul 25th, 2007, 8:26am » |
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ok, so far we're only 5 players to have responded positively ; maybe the best is to let people "register" to the ladder in this post if they are interested in commenting games and have their games commented.
Just mention it here too if you want a game to be reviewed (or send me a message), I'll ask the players of appropriate ranking to try to find a reviewer. If the teaching ladder happens to have enough success, we might need some infrastructure to distribute the to-be-reviewed games among the reviewers.
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chessandgo
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Arimaa player #1889
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Re: a teaching ladder ?
« Reply #12 on: Jul 29th, 2007, 6:35am » |
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on Jul 18th, 2007, 4:50pm, aaaa wrote:| Arimaa is way too obscure of a game for such a thing being necessary in lieu of the simple commenting system |
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Apparently you were right. Let's forget about this teaching ladder stuff, then.
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