Hi, the chinese rule doesn't use stone scoring, but area scoring. It does say that surrounded intersections are worth one point each.

If you are talking about pure stone scoring, then, it seems to me that it has practical drawbacks : either you
-spend your time playing each game to the 360th move,
or you must
-Stop by agreement,
-Count the number of independently alive groups,
-Define what independent life is, which is exactly what we wanted to avoid !

Area scoring + group tax = stone scoring.

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Thinking like a go player during a game of chess is like bringing a knife to a gun-fight. Thinking like a chess player during a game of go feels like getting knifed while you're holding a gun...

It seems to me that, since all intersections are scored in Chinese scoring (except those in seki), parity of dame isn't an issue. If the parity of dame changes, it's not like an extra point is added or removed, because it would be part of one of the players' scores anyway. In very close games, good play requires keeping track of score under any scoring system, and parity of dame points can be easily determined when you know the current scores. If the difference between both players' scores is even, parity of dame points is odd, and vice versa.

Also, assuming I'm wrong and it indeed makes the game more difficult, couldn't the dame be made irrelevant once and for all by using the button? Let's imagine a situation where there are only dame points left to play and we don't know their parity. Black goes first. If there is an even number of dame points, Black will take the button for a net result of 0.5 points for Black. If there is an odd number of dame points, Black will get one more point than White by filling the last dame, but then White will take the button for a net result of 0.5 points for Black, same as before.

You are missing the point(s).

In creating software to play go, it can be difficult to create code that can accurately decide which groups are alive and which are dead at the ends of games. One way to help a bot decide is to have the bot play inside its own territory until each eye is only 1 or 2 points in size. But, with Japanese rules, playing inside one's own territory costs points. Not so with Chinese rules. As a result, many bots are programmed to play using Chinese rules.

Unfortunately, this causes a tendency for games with bots to run long.

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$Bcm1 dead?
$$ ---------------------------------------
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . O X . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . O X . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . O X 3 |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . , O X 1 |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . O X X |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . O O O |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
$$ ----------------------------------------[/go]

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be immersed

If (a)...(d) are the only legal moves remaining on the board:

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$B
$$ ---------------
$$ | a b c d X O ?
$$ | X X X X X O ?
$$ | O O O O O O ?
$$ | ? ? ? ? ? ? ?[/go]

- Randombot has exactly 25% chance to play on one of them (if Pass is not an option) ;
( or exactly 20% chance of one of [a,b,c,d,Pass] )
- AlphaGo tends to perform slightly better.Depending on the bot, this may or may not be part of the logic, and there may be additional criterias to decide a move. These other criterias may work in conjunction with the above technique, or they may override it in certain situations. So yes, var 1 is entirely possible with a Randombot.

Thanks, Ed.

My post was partly sarcastic, and partly in hopes to trigger a response that gave more details about this class of algorithm:-)

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be immersed

Hi Kirby, You're welcome.

It can be tricky sometimes to tell the tone of voice online.
Also, there may be a range of different levels in understanding of programming in the viewers, so sometimes it's OK to go back to the basics.

Agreed. Now, with a serious tone, does anyone know how a smart bot might select which moves to play within its own territory in order to determine life and death? It's not straightforward to me unless the algorithm does a search to iterate to a terminal state.

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be immersed

Not only you; seems to be a non-trivial problem: at least CGoban and SmartGo sometimes get confused about the life-and-death (and dames), and still need human intervention in the final scoring. IGS' life-and-death marking is also not 100% automated and needs human clicking. Does anyone know how AlphaGo, Zen, Leela, etc. solved this ?

Leela, at least, still makes errors marking life and death (though it's getting better), so I don't think it's a solved problem.

Life and death status assessment by sampling (as done by NN/MC programs) does not "solve" problems. Problems are solved if the solution is verified or verifyable by a mathematical proof or mathematically proven algorithm.

Well, some bots might actually do that. But, more likely, a bot would split single eyes of 3 or more points, so would start with a stone at T7 or T6.

A better yet about-the-same-difficulty-to-code algorithm will be let opponent play inside first. Then this side try to capture them.

What? Seriously?

I've been playing over-the-board games with Japanese scoring for a decade and I still get extremely nervous when counting a close game -- particularly when my opponent seems unwilling to slow the heck down and take care!

It is so trivially easy to make a mistake when moving stones about between territories of the same colour and, in my experience, not everyone is willing to be pedantic or even logical -- often leaving borders saying, "this was a black territory so it's fine if *most* of the border stones are still black. We'll just remember it was black's."

Nah. I hate that. And I cannot comprehend how players can spend three hours on a tournament game and then rush the counting but even at the low SDK ranks in tournaments, they still do.

@Charlie: Have you ever counted the Chinese way?

Basic procedure:

1. Reshape territory into rectangular areas.
   Note: During this procedure you may throw any and all stones (alive or dead) you want into the bowls, or take stones from bowls and add them to the board, or move stones between areas, to help make rectangular shapes.
   Players do not always take care to keep borders one color (just remember whose territory it is) and do not always take it slowly and carefully.
2. Count the territory and remember this number.
3. Arrange the stones on the board into piles of 10.
4. Count the stones
5. Add the result of 2 and 4

Generally only one color is counted, as the other player then has the remainder of the 361 points. If there is seki, you can fill the seki intersections 50/50 with black/white stones, if there are an odd number of seki intersections, you have to leave one empty and remember that it gives both players half an additional point.

So basically the same risks as territory counting on step 1, but with the additional concern that moving to/from bowls can make it harder to reconstruct things.

And then there's the additional risk that the number from step 2 might be disagreed about (with no way to recount after step 3), or the seki might be forgotten.

In practice, both methods rarely have issues and in 99.9% of cases no dispute arises from the counting though.

"The Chinese" is a metaphor for "area scoring" and need not include "Chinese counting for area scoring". There are other counting methods, including such that do not alter the position, include a consistency check and allow recounting easily: http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/int.html#Counting

Seems a lot easier to me. You only need to count one colour and you can add or remove stones at your convenience so reshaping the territory is a lot easier if it is a diagonal region. (Edit: logically, this could also help make the first number a round number so easier to remember, or to remove as many stones as possible, removing them from the next counting step.)

But I agree, in general. The problem is not the rule set. It's rushed counting. That could happen with both rule sets.

I still think it is wrong to say that counting is *harder* with Chinese rules. Different problems - maybe - but it's not like Japanese rules are not prone to the issues I point out.

This all makes me feel a bit queasy.

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Patience, grasshopper.