Okay, so we are starting to clarify what your intended audience is, and that it does not include beginners. That's okay, there are plenty of rule texts in the world that are not accessible to beginners. But does your audience include the following?

1. Go rules experts.
2. Ordinary go players experienced with rulesets other than NZ.

I can't speak for go rules experts as I am not one. So I don't know if compact language is of value to them. I fall into category 2) and the issue there is that too much compactness gets in the way of clarity.

It would help me at least if I understood your motivation better. Do you want to put the rules on a t-shirt or something? Maybe game theorists have an extensive-form represenation of NZ rules already that could compress well, if human comprehension is not your goal.

It's literally just for my own interest. It's a challenge/theoretical problem. How many characters does it take to express MNZR in English. I already know I can replace "intersection" with "grid point" to save two more characters. If anyone was hoping to accomplish something more worthwhile, we could also try to use what we've discussed to try to compress widely used rulesets.

I have not heard of extensive-form rules, but they sound like they need lots of definition to be precise.

Color of first player is not really relevant to the rules. If you're going for ultra-compast, why not drop it?



No more so than your original phrasing, IMO.



You can use "orthogonally" if you want, but since there are a lot of points open for (mis)interpretation anyway, I don't think this one is serious.



Then don't call it CMNZR, give it a new name. CMMR, perhaps?

Also if you're going for compactness, stone scoring is very compact without significantly altering strategy.

In actual play, it's convenient to only pick who goes first, not color as well. That, along with not doing stone scoring, are part of my ruleset, which concept itself is not part of this thread unless you want it to be. (I left out whether winning is absolute or has degrees - I don't care about that.) If you can show me that a chain definition can be shorter than a path definition, be my guest. But I contest that CMNZR (NZ because it's very similar) has illegal grammar.

1. Black, White etc. *1* quits, passes, or puts One's piece on an empty [intersection/grid point], removing Other's *2* without paths along the lines to empty spots through only Other's *3* then for One's-avoid board states of One's past turns.
2. If One passes following a pass *4* Other resumes 1 by no pass or agrees on pieces to remove before each sums One's, empty spots without paths to Other's not through One's, and 7 if *5* White if Black had no first free turns.

Is there a problem with any of the asterisked areas? The subject of the verbs after *1* is singular, omitting the object of "Other's" etc. is legal like in this sentence: "Mario's hat was stolen, and so was Luigi's.", and commas or extra conjunctions at *3* and *4* are not required for proper sentence structure. *5* is fuzzy, what do you think?

So many words written in attempt to say something in a compact way.
Amazing. Absolutely amazing!
And funny...
Lol.

It reminds me of a few common sayings... like:
- A war to end all wars; or
- Lets have meetings back to back until we figure out why nothing gets done around here...
... and so on.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

In justification of the ironic over-discussion, the combinatorial universe of lossless MNZR compressions is exponential in scope. Funny indeed.

Just had to say it. [/off-topic]

My interpretation was willfully perverse, but you have to consider those interpretations to suss out the logical consequences of a set of rules. From your post, I thought you were into logic chopping.

I think coming up with idiomatic and easily understood rules for explaining the game is a good pursuit, but it's not the typical one in these parts.

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Occupy Babel!

Pointing out other possible interpretations is very useful. Please don't take me the wrong way when I disagree.

"Black, White, etc. is not singular but plural.

Capitalizing "One" and "Other" is either incorrect or makes them proper nouns, in which case the rules specify that both Black and White play with the pieces of some guy named One, and do not provide any way for the stones of this guy named Other to get on the board at all.

But anyway, I will refrain from making further comments, as I don't think your approach has merit.

I'm not stubborn. What's a better approach that's as short?

Don't optimize prematurely. All this worrying about length of words and dropping punctuation is irrelevant until you have confidence your rules say what you want them to say. You can always change "intersections" into "grid points" or "points" into "spots" later.

First try several different approaches at stating the rules to find what works (e.g. chains vs. paths vs. grid colorings vs. whatever).

Don't worry about grammatical legality, worry about readability. The purpose of language is to communicate, not to satisfy some set of mathematical rules about punctuation, spelling, and word order. (e.g. my approach with "own" is much more understandable than your "One's", regardless of grammatical legality.)

Don't include needless details. IMO the "etc." allowing for more than just Black and White is useless.

Quitting is a meta-game rule, not a game rule, as is the whole agree/resume stage of counting. These are not required for complete game rules. If you want it in there, just add some "Players may agree on the result, or" clause before the counting rules.

This is a theoretical problem, a challenge.
Fair. I originally thought about the approaches and concluded paths was the most concise, but I typed the others out this time and:

Path:

Captured is without paths along the lines to empty spots through only One's.
Area is One's and empty spots without paths to Other's not through One's.

Recursive:

Not captured is 1 grid line from empty spots or the not captured.
Area is One's and empty spots 1 line from area.

Chain:

2 connected pieces are 1 grid line apart or connected to a third.
Not captured is connected to a piece 1 grid line from an empty spot.
Area is One's and empty spots not connected to an empty spot 1 line from Other's.

There's probably a way to improve the chain definition, but recursion seems to be better than paths after all. So here's a CMNZR attempt:

1. Black, White etc. quits, passes, or puts One's piece on an empty grid point, removing Other's captured (not 1 grid line from empty spots or Other's uncaptured) then One's captured-avoid board states of One's past turns.
2. If One passes following a pass Other resumes 1. by no pass or agrees on pieces to remove before each finds area (+7 if White if Black had no first free turns). Area is One's pieces and empty spots 1 line from area.

Compare with CMNZR 1.1:

1. Black, White etc. quits, passes, or puts One's piece on an empty grid point, removing Other's without paths along the lines to empty spots through only Other's then for One's-avoid board states of One's past turns.
2. If One passes following a pass Other resumes 1 by no pass or agrees on pieces to remove before each sums One's, empty spots without paths to Other's not through One's, and 7 if White if Black had no first free turns.

Surprisingly (to me too), CMNZR 1.1 is three characters shorter. I think what's wrong with the recursive version is the necessary introduction of the term "captured" to enable recursion, and the change of focus from pieces to captured pieces in rule 1 means that "pieces" can't be omitted from "One's pieces" in the area definition.

Now back to some other comments you made. There is an implied "each" after "Black, White etc."; with the right emphasis, it sounds fine to me in speech. Proper nouns can be used to capitalize common nouns, like Enemy or Justice. Removing "etc." would both remove another of the few indicators of alternating turns and leave the grammatically incorrect "Black, White". Fixing it with "Black then White" makes the ruleset actually contradict itself by implying just two turns.

We seem to disagree on the definition of "complete game rules". Here's my take. The game is Go. Rules specify what are legal actions by a nonempty set of intelligent entities while voluntarily constrained to those rules. Complete means all-encompassing of actions that must be allowed and disallowed to constitute a game. I have up to now willed that everything common to Go rules (except for whether winning has degrees - I'm not sure yet) be included in CMNZR. Quitting is part of the game; it is ending the game. How to handle a (dead) stone disagreement, namely by resuming a phase with a specific player, is certainly a rigorous and precise action like how situational superko works. Cheating without being caught, not quitting, is where I draw the line of meta-game - that's where an entity demonstrates a lack of will to be constrained by the rules.

Someone may convince me that how to decide who goes first should also be included by my reasoning despite not being included in most Go rulesets...

I am starting to realize some optimizations for the recursive approach, though. Here's CMNZR 2.0:

1. Black, White etc. quits, passes, or puts One's piece on an empty grid point; remove Other's captured (not 1 grid line from empty spots or Other's uncaptured) then One's-avoid board states of One's past turns.
2. If One passes following a pass Other resumes 1. by no pass or agrees on pieces to remove before each finds area (empty spots 1 line from area or One's pieces; +7 if White if Black had no first free turns).

"captured" could maybe be replaced by "caught", "doomed" (lol), "dead", or "out".

Why characters? Surely you should first define a formal meta-language and then express the rules in it. Like

US

stands for "unique situations", i.e., it is required to create only not repeated situations. And

TM

stands for "an allowed alternate turn order sequence pattern is player-mixed", where player-mixed means Black - White. Etc. Of course, you want to omit blanks, so we get

USTM

Needless to say, further compression is possible. The entire rules can be expressed in a single character, which points to the rules description:

0

I do not think though that zero characters suffice, as palapiku seems to imply.

I don't see how defining new terms (which will take characters in English) will provide optimizations, as there is very little redundancy of terms in the rules right now. I could abbreviate Black and White, but that's probably about it. And yeah...pointing defeats the purpose, as I started this thread with a much shorter description than CMNZR that references NZ rules.