My impression is that counting stones is better for the very first games on 5x5. Filling the board is very fast there, anyway. When a beginner understands the game enough to figure out life and death properly, and start to find it tedious to fill-up the board at the end on 9x9, then it might be better to use more traditional rules.

I feel that someone who learned the game with this scoring method will have no difficulty to adjust to usual methods, anyway.

I wanted to design the web site in such a way that the visitor can start playing as soon as possible. In my original plan, I wanted to introduce Chinese scoring for 9x9. But I was maybe a bit lazy, so I left stone-count scoring for all board sizes. I will probably add Chinese scoring in the future as an option.

Hmmm. I might be a good idea to have the beginners play on the 7x7 after the 5x5.

_________________
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ok, I finally got it to pass first -- I think. I can't really tell. Its not obvious at all. There's absolutely no indication of what just happened. Maybe its my browser/os

here's a one time display bug... I'll see if I can get it to happen again. might just my my problem, as my browser frequently runs low on memory with so many tabs open.



here's what the position should look like at :W44:

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$m43
$$ ---------------------
$$ | . . O O X . . X . |
$$ | . . O X . . . . X |
$$ | . . O X X X X X O |
$$ | . . . O O O . O O |
$$ | . O O X X . O O . |
$$ | . X X . X O W X . |
$$ | . . X . X O X . . |
$$ | . X X X O O . 1 . |
$$ | . . . O . . . . . |
$$ ---------------------[/go]

It happened just after playing the 2-2 stone in the lower right

Thanks for the bug report. What is your OS & browser?

Firefox (47.0.1) on Mac (10.11.5)

Some thoughts from some total beginners (me and my kids, ages 4, 7, 9):
(1) the tutorial is visually appealing and easy to understand
(2) the AI is really convenient and "friendly" for them to play lots of games quickly
(3) scoring/end of game in the full game is confusing and it helps my little ones get into the game by leaving that complexity out. As an aside: the stone counting system works nicely as a natural source of math problems for v young kids to practice counting/estimating/multiplication. I guess proper scoring systems also have this feature, but it adds an extra level of abstraction as counting stones is a little more natural than counting empty spaces.

As a second aside, the first game I watched was Lee Sedol vs AlphaGo and I was quite bewildered when Lee Sedol resigned and I had no idea who was ahead, let alone that the end of the game was so clear.

(4)

Our problem is the opposite: shortening the game when we've clearly lost! I suggested adding a button for the player to resign to let them jump back to the game replay and get next-move hints.

For my kids when they have won, they actually enjoy the last phase of the game sealing the victory as each stone they place is like a little reward for defeating the AI.

(5) Any thoughts on how strong the AI is on the 9x9 board? My kids asked me if anyone could post a game where they defeated the AI on a 9 stone handicap. The best we've managed is to play white and win without any handicap stones.

(6) Finally, in addition to Crazy Sensei, our introduction to Go has been:
- Interactive Way to Go (http://playgo.to/iwtg/en/). Also a very nice tutorial that goes several steps beyond the Crazy Sensei tutorial. Sorry to say, but clunkier interface loses points for a first introduction if the audience is at all skeptical. I think it will work well to go back to this tutorial after starting with Remi's tutorial.
- Yukari Sensei videos that were shown with Hikaru no Go
- Playing lots of small boards (1x1 to 5x5, 9x9) on a makeshift board at home: http://3jlearneng.blogspot.com/search/label/go
- tsumego from iPhone Go Problems app.