Good point On the other hand, the surprising variations that Kirby and others showed in which we see that the white stone may not be as dead as it looks, offer a wonderful and important lesson: When discussing go, the specifics of a position always matter. Naturally, a beginner may not have suspected these intricacies, and you were right to offer a position that better served to clarify the question at hand, but I don't think that the answers previously given were out of line. On the contrary, they demonstrate that go players are rightfully cautious about making general pronouncements.

_________________
Patience, grasshopper.

“he may not be back” & similar … I'm back.

I admit to frustration with the game over this issue though. This otherwise excellent introduction http://www.playgo.to/iwtg/en/count.html where I got my example from, says “Thus black will not make such moves.” But there is no “thus” because they do the opposite of what you would think without the knowledge of the ending procedure of testing life and death. Many introductions are similar.

It was meant to be a simple toy example that put the issue I had into a nutshell. But it turned out a 5x2 area is enough to require analysis from you experts!

Actually looking again I see that wikipedia Go and Rules_of_go do address this, but only after I know what to look for. Territory counting does seem to lead to headaches (the rules not covering every situation, tribunals, different treatment of ko). Ambiguity and the need for special cases in the rules (like topazg' bent four in the corner and “the awkward bit for which I have no answer”) is off-putting, makes further traps for beginners and generally detracts from the elegance of the game.

There does seem to be folk knowledge and gentlemens' agreements involved that is not explicitly included in the rules. Or does that go too far?

- Question: Wikipedia says under territory scoring “If the players reach an incorrect conclusion, then they both lose”. But how do we know the conclusion is incorrect? Who says? Also does it mean the disputed territory is not counted to either player, or that neither wins the game? (The latter seems harsh!)

- Question: Does area counting avoid all these difficulties? Why isn't this method (or other rule choice mentioned) adopted by all if so?

Also : “you have to explain in a beginner-friendly way”
For me, the problem was the absence of important information (about territory scoring), everything said here is understandable and interesting. Thank you all.

Area scoring is used, but once you get used to territory scoring, it is quite fast. It just takes a bit of time to get used to and preferably have someone show you.

The odd positions like bent 4 show up once in a while, but they're not hard to take into account.

As a general statement for all those rulesets having territory scoring, this is wrong. A both lose rule occurs for the Japanese 1989 Rules, but the actual rule says something else. Therefore, if your citation is accurate (I have not checked it), this information on Wikipedia is misleading or possible wrong. As a beginner, you do not get any advantage by studying the 1989 Rules, as you can notice by having (not more than) a quick glance at

http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/j1989c.html



In theory, the ultimate source is the complete knowledge of all legal sequences and strategic decisions; this concept is sometimes called "the omniscient player". In practice and for practically occurring positions to be judged by arbitration, the strongest (available) player (should) have the knowledge and skill to make the same judgement that the omniscient player would make. Alternatively, it sometimes is possible to make mathematical proofs about the existence of sequences and related decision-making, although such does not appear in real world territory scoring rulesets.



Forget about these "both lose" ideas until you want to become a rules expert.



Yes.



Because in some countries, clubs or tournaments, the existing tradition of using territory scoring prevails over simplicity.

Glad you are still with us.



I learned the Japanese rules that came with the go set I bought in Jackson, MS, many years ago, which were probably as crummy as the rules that came with your set, but I never had any trouble. I know people who did have headaches, though.



The Ing rules may or may not cover ever situation, but they are area rules. The Japanese rules (territory) have a certain ambiguity in the definition of life and death. Different rules treat kos and other repetitive situations differently, but that is a modern development. I don't know about tribunals. {shrug}



The ambiguity of the 1989 Japanese rules concerning life and death has never been a problem in practice. But it's only been 26 years. Maybe something will come up. The 1949 Japanese rules had special cases, but that is a non-issue now. (BTW, I was shodan before I knew what Bent Four in the Corner was. )

As for the "awkward bit for which I have no answer", all rules have problems with such positions. The basic problem, as I pointed out, is that the players should not have stopped play at that point. However the rules handle such positions, there will be an argument against what they do.



Go was played for centuries, perhaps millenia, without written rules. So, yes, everything was folk knowledge and gentlemen's agreements. Occasionally some rules problem arose, which the players usually took to a stronger player for adjudication. There are a couple of famous examples before the 20th century. Got that? A couple. Not much of a problem.

Then, in a team match in Japan in 1928, one of the players, Takahashi Shigeyuki, violated one of those gentlemen's agreements and refused to end the game as directed by the referee. (His teammates encouraged him in this.) For more, if you can stand it, see http://senseis.xmp.net/?TenThousandYearKo%2FrulesCrisis . One interesting thing about this rules dispute was that nobody could say whether the move was a right or an obligation. There were no passes in those days. The pass in go is a modern invention.

Nearly all go rules today end play by a succession of passes. But without passes, how did play end in those days? By agreement -- a gentlemen's agreement, if you will. (Note: Many no pass games reach a point where further play does no good and the result can be determined without play. That is a natural stopping point, and the players normally stop play by agreement. )



Wikipedia is not quite correct. If play stops at an "awkward bit" position and the players do not resume play, then both players lose. That is harsh, but the Japanese 1989 rules were written by and for professionals. AFAIK, that rule has never been invoked.



No. However, the players can avoid or resolve many end of game disputes by play under area scoring, because filling your own territory costs nothing. Edit: Unless you fill an eye you need for life.



Mostly because the potential problems for territory scoring hardly ever arise. Except for beginners, unfortunately. But in the main places where territory scoring is used, beginners usually play against more experienced players who can resolve and explain life and death questions at the end of the game.

In the West, beginners often play beginners, which is why I recommend area scoring for beginners.

----

Actually, there is a form of go, called Button Go, which synthesizes territory and area scoring and, IMO, is better than either. But that is another discussion.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

In theory the results follow from the rules, but the situations can be complicated as to why, and most people don't know the specific rulesets well enough to understand it. So, sort of. It's really much cleaner with area scoring, even though that was a later development.


This only applies to the current Japanese rules, and is something you should ignore unless you plan to play in tournaments in Japan. Possibly only professional ones.

There's a bit of commentary on it here: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wjh/go/rules/Japanese.html. As I understand it, by the rules if you request to resume play, your opponent gets to play first. In those examples in the commentary, it means that whoever asks to resume play gives away the good move to their opponent, losing the game. Since each player would lose the game by requesting resumption, neither one does. However, the game is really uncountable because the status of the group is not determined. As such, each player is determined to have not taken the move needed to win, therefor they lost.


It does for the most part. As for why it's not adopted everywhere, a variety of historical and political reasons. For one thing, there is no "ruling body of go" or anything like it. Different countries have different organizations. Area scoring was developed relatively late in China (possibly to help prevent cheating when gambling) after go had already taken hold in other countries like Japan and Korea. Counting method changes had already occurred in Japan and Korea by that point as well. Now that each has established go organizations with a high level of play, there aren't enough scoring disputes and issues to make it worthwhile for them to change. To look at another example, the innovation of starting with an empty board, instead of a preset starting position, dates back maybe 500 years or so to Japan. But it's only in the last century that each country agreed that standard go started with an empty board, and go with the various set starting positions were variants. In international tournaments, the rules or ruleset is generally specified beforehand. Even then, if two players mutually counted the score via territory scoring, say, when the rules specified area, I doubt anyone would care or notice unless there were a dispute or it was one of the top boards.

Second, in Asian countries, most people don't really worry about the rules at a high level like this at all. They are often passed orally between casual players or picked up through osmosis rather than by reading a document.Traditionally, for example, a triple ko is just a voided game, or no result, and the more complicated situations, like moonshine life, many players have never heard of or seen. In many rulesets, there is now a superko rule that determines in which cases a player may take each ko and in which they may not, but this is frequently ignored in casual play.

To take chess as an example here, most people learn the rules through a friend or family member, who guides them through the process rather than explaining all of the intricacies of stalemates and drawn games and such right away. No one not playing in a tournament of some sort worries that they've hit the 50-move rule.

In the west, go came to most places via Japan, so the base of players, small as it may have been, used traditional Japanese rules and scoring (territory scoring). The physical act of counting the game is quite different between area and territory scoring, so there's a lot of resistance to change in that respect. To avoid this, many western rulesets, like the AGA one, use area scoring behind the scenes and have some sort of trick to allow games to be counted in the traditional (territory) manner while coming up with the same score as an area-counting method.

One of those rules problems was the problem in Europe for a few centuries to understand what (besides its playing material) Go is by trying to understand what the (verbal Japanese) rules are.

When I learned go I used Japanese rules. Not 1949 Japanese rules, not Japanese 1989 rules, not 2000 Japanese rules, not Japanese rules with a twist of lemon. It was just rules as used in Japan, which may have been fuzzy around the edges once in a blue moon, but I never saw a blue moon. I only ever encountered a very slight difficulty once, when a 2-dan opponent wasn't aware that bent four is dead. He accepted his loss graciously once other strong players convinced him that was the rule - no explanation , just "that is the rule." And games ended just as graciously with a gentleman's agreement - just as they usually do now in most clubs.

Nowadays, thanks to the rules mavens, in the very occasional games I play I have absolutely no idea whether bent four is dead, whether I have to pass, or whether points count in a seki, and this is not at all to do with the fact I usually don't know what day of the week it is. The mavens have created confusion. They have added nothing to the game. They have taken away much. Too many cooks have not just spoiled the broth; they have pissed in it.

Which divinity ever said go has to be describable by perfect rules? Go is still mostly a social game. Society decides the rules.

Whether unambiguity of rules of play is desirable depends on intentions. E.g., a yin-yang approach makes imperfection desirable according to Sakai Takeshi; automatic computer - computer play makes perfection desirable.



Go is also a study object and a computer game. There have been more than one society involved (such as Chinese and Japanese).

quoting myself, quoting tiger314, from another thread...

This thread has a lot of interesting discussion, but in my opinion, it has become more complicated than it needs to be*.

Let's go back to your original example:

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Bm11
$$ ----------
$$ | . . O X C C |
$$ | . . O X W C |
$$ | . . O X C C |
$$ | . . O X C C |
$$ | . . O X C C |
$$ | . . O X C C |
$$ | . . O X C C |
$$ -----------[/go]

If both players pass, the game is over. The marked white stone is within the black area, as shown above, and it counts as black's points. That's because both players passed, which means the stones within the bordered off areas are dead.

If white doesn't pass, and makes something happen (eg. captures stones, etc.), then the game's not over.

That's the big picture.









*Maybe there are corner cases where it's useful to analyze these details, but let's get the big picture first.

_________________
be immersed

I took a look at that page. It does contain an error:

"Your final score is your territory on the board, plus the captures you have removed from the board."

That should be this:

"Your final score is your territory on the board, plus the captures and dead stones you have removed from the board."

As for the moves that Black will not make, the example is a move inside White territory that White answers, so that the score remains unchanged. As I indicated, that statement is a bit of an overgeneralization. Sometimes such moves are played. But as a rule the players see no point in making such plays, and thus do not make them.

I suppose that the page could be improved by pointing out that after White answers the score remains the same, and saying that players do not make such plays because they are pointless.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

I'm curious where you are having this experience. I play a lot, and I never really encounter the issue.

I play at our local go club twice a week, and everyone just plays by Japanese Rules as you describe them. No specific version, just what they learned when they started, and if any confusion arises they ask a stronger player (usually me). They may pass, but that is just a formality and it is also quite usual to say something along the lines of "well, that's about it, right?" and just quickly fill the dame and start counting.

I visit a tournament about once per month, and again my experience is similar. People are there to play and socialize, nobody cares about rules minutiae.

Even as a referee, which I also do regularly, I rarely see any disputes. Mostly I see questions about clocks. I refereed the Amsterdam tournament last week and I must've had a dozen questions about the byoyomi (which was displayed in a confusing way on the clock) but had zero questions about passing, bent four, seki, or any of that.

So in my experience, rules lawyering is just background noise which happens mostly on the internet, not in actual games. In most contexts that I play, people are quite aware of the implicit social contract, and anyone who is being anti-social on rules issues would at some point be ostracised.

You have essentially answered your own question. You play a lot. I said I play "very occasional" games. I am therefore not properly attuned to what is going on.

But, as the GoGoD compiler, I do regularly see games played under Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Ing and western rules, including the various historical versions of these, and so I am aware that not only are various rulesets in use but various changes to each have also been made. That just adds to my confusion.

I am not the only one confused, however, As to the wider effect, although I don't play in tournaments now I have attended some, and what I see for example at the American Congress, which is supposed to be under AGA rules, is some people playing with AGA rules and people next to them playing Japanese rules. In European events long ago I have played Japanese rules when Ing rules were technically in force. Even where all players have attempted to play under Ing rules, there have been notorious cases where one person's interpretation has differed from another's.



I think this is true everywhere. The problems occur because those who do care about the nitty-gritty seem to have a disproportionate effect.



Again I agree. The only rider I would add is that lots of people now seem to get their notion of the rules from the angry airt of the internet and so they face the full blast of the rules mavens' storms. All the more reason to read books and seek the bield of a friendly club!

Those interested in perceiving rules disputes as kibitzes perceive them much more easily than those not interested in perceiving rules disputes.

In Europe, the number of rules disputes about the rules of play have decreased as a consequence of better written rules and (in particular my) rules commentaries in the internet. The number of rules disputes about tournament rules have been roughly constant, although specific types of disputes having now been clarified in the tournament rules have become rare. Other rules disputes about tournament rules have become more frequent because more "efficient" tournament organisation has become more popular and creates new unnecessary troubles such as incorrectly set clocks by the tournament organisers. Yes, time disputes are relatively frequent tournament rules disputes.

In my "first" club, long before I started studying rules, different rulesets were used: Japanese and sometimes Chinese. This caused a bent-4 dispute. Missing rules understanding and explanation meant that I (and probably everybody in my club) was unaware of the differences between full counting and half counting (only years later I understood why my Chinese opponents were impressed when I won by ca. 7 Chinese [half] counting points) and between territory scoring and area scoring (it was easy to overlook because we filled dame alternately and we kyus were too weak to count before the game end).

Therefore, it is not just everywhere that one group of players would have a uniform rules usage. This is not so much a matter of socialising but about impact of ideas.

Needless to say, all this was after ca. a decade of not understanding go because of territory scoring confusion (horrible explanation is a game set) following by my first teacher's (Jürgen Mattern) explanation that, when he travelled to tournaments in Asia, he had to know WAGC Rules and Ing Rules.

I think you are missing a few quite important things. Firstly, the last revision of Japonese rules was 26 years ago. As far as I know, they have been used ever since the English translation was published as THE written ruled of Go in Europe (save the Ing rules episode and the few countries that have adopted the AGA rules). Secondly, I am pretty sure your commentaries have been read by very few players. Only a handful have ever read a commentary at all. Of those who have read at least one commentary, most have read only one, the commentary that is part of the English translation of J89. Thirdly, you have missed the effects of the internet. The rules being available online, forums to discuss them, and articles about disputes are all amongst the things that have severely effected the "dispute frequency". Plus the option of playing under different rules on servers has introduced the fact of multiple rulesets existing to many players.

_________________
“Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; argument an exchange of ignorance.” ― Robert Quillen

tiger314, see my answer viewtopic.php?p=187995#p187995

Citation required.



Yes, this is my suspicion too. Not that disputes were particularly common in the UK anyway.

As you see.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Well it is fascinating too Bill (and everyone). I was concerned I was making a meal of rule ambiguity and so on. But I'm not worried now!

The theoretical angle of the status of the rules is interesting to me, but on the practical level I'll not worry too much for now when playing (now that my original difficulty is cleared up). Although I suppose computer programs do in fact need to be "rules lawyers" and evaluate life/death in Japanese rules.