Re: alcohol will improve your go.

Davou wrote:
perhaps thats true, but I'm very much accustomed to being stoned. I find that a little pot helps me shrug off a mistake on the goban, and keep my cool. calm and temperament thought to yose. also, It does a very good job of putting the balls in my pants, and giving me the guts to play that 30 point move that looks dangerous, than the 5 point safe move.

One thing I dont like about playing stoned.... I often find myself reading ahead.... looking at the stones, and before I know it, My mind has wandered to thoughts of cartoons and food :P

gowan4 wrote:

Based on observation I would say that marijuana use results in a two or
three stone drop in go performance.




While I agree that alcohol rather adversely affects one's ability to play Go, my experience being two good lagers is one stone and each lager thereafter is another stone reduction in playing strength, I do not agree that this affect occurs with marijuana. I will maintain, for the sake of argument, which certain readers of this newsgroup are competent at, that the opposite is true, a little marijuana will improve your play, probably by allowing you an increased level of concentration on the problem in front of you. As support for this, let me tell you of a certain study done at a certain university in 1969. A certain party received from the US Department of Defense, and with the approval of his faculty advisor, a grant to study the effects of marijuana on the ability to learn and retain information. The design of the experiment was submitted to DoD through said advisor and was approved, the Navy being particularly interested. The experiment consisted of four groups being tested, ie timed, for their learning a set of a dozen, four-letter nonsense strings and a week later, being timed as to how long it took them to remember the same list. There were several such lists, and these lists were carefully designed so there were no patterns to them, learning was simple, brute force rote memorization. Learning was defined as the ability to repeat the list correctly the first time, and recall was defined as the ability to repeat the list correctly the first time, with prompts. The four control groups were learning and retention straight and straight, straight and stoned, stoned and straight, and stoned and stoned. So, three quarters of your subjects had to be marijuana users on some level (users were not divided, in this experiment, into novice, casual, or chronic users). Now, this experiment suffered from being a classic example of a biased sample, as is obvious :), nevertheless, I think the same is true of the readers of this newsgroup, they're a biased sample, and the results may be of interest. In short, the group that learned fastest and retained best was the stoned-stoned group, and the slowest at learning with least retention was the straight-straight group. Around this same time, there was a series of experiments at another college which concluded that use of marijuana results in a decrease in dendrite function, the speculation being that the person under the affects is paying less attention to "background noise" and is more focused and aware of that upon which he is concentrating. And that's my two cents contribution to this thread - responses? The ball is in your court :)

Cheers,
Michael (who did not design or conduct the experiment)
.

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