And that's OK, isn't it? May I interest you in a game of Malkovich tic-tac-toe?

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be immersed

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I didn't read this monster thread, but:

the most intuitive scoring is counting alive stones at the end of the game. This should map to chinese with group tax.

'intuitive'is very subjective.
To me, the most intuitive is counting what you surrounded plus what you captured.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

Try to explain it to a beginner. You need a whole concept less (and one that is the origin of many bad habits) and it is much more straightforward in the handling of seki and similar problems I used to wonder about when learning Go with Japanese rules. (If you start learning without guidance from a book and need to explain the rules to a friend to play this is a real problem. If you feel you don't understand you may never start.)

I did. It worked. Without any glitches.
I was taught like that too when I was a beginner, and obviously - that worked too.

Not sure what else to say.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

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And the go-fever which is more real than many doctors’ diseases, waked and raged...
- Rudyard Kipling, "The Light That Failed" (1891)

Before the end of the game, you can think of them as crafty POWs like in Hogan's Heroes and your opponent as some kind of inept Colonel Klink. If it helps, that is...

Well I read an article about the rules that said that the earliest written rules of how you win in the tang dynasty of china which was like around 700 AD said that "most stones win" which sounds like most captures to me. and even counting the living stones on the board, the person who captured more pieces would have more living stones.

How is it "intuitive" that some stones of the same colour are alive and some are not alive?! Intuition tells one that what looks the same is the same: black stones are black and white stones are white.

The counting method he suggest works by playing the game out until there are no more dead stones on the board, only living stones. The only intersections not occupied by living stones will be the eyes mandatory for esuring life of the particular group in question.

Maybe you're thinking of some weird special occurs-once-in-every-100-million-games situation where there's a seki which relies on some dead stones not being removed or something? (Even then, seems to me those stones would have to be considered alive in that case.)


And no matter how much noise the "traditionalists" make, I find it hard to argue against the ease of area scoring when it comes to counting for beginners.

edit: s/relies by/works by/
Grammar is hard.

I also find this counter-intuitive, particularly because go is often explained as two armies fighting for more of the board, and the first terms we learn are life & death, and then dead soldiers get tossed in the bowl to be recycled?

In this context, I can't help but bringing up a pet-peeve of mine, which is that the terms "dead" and "prisoners" in my mind ought to be switched. I mean, removing the stones from the board is like killing the soldiers, whereas surrounding them so that they can't escape makes them prisoners, no?

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Patience, grasshopper.

Scoring method.



It becomes "intuitive" if the terms "dead" and "living" are omitted and just the stones on the board considered.

Also during a game dead stones can become alive (e.g. because of a ko fight) but prisoners never become free

A good point, and not a flaw in the Japanese rules. The Japanese refer to prisoners as toriishi, torihama, ageishi, agehama and toriageta ishi, all of which mean simply 'removed stones' (they also say just hama, which means 'clam' = stone).

In the case of 'dead', the usual Japanese form is shini, which is the tenseless renyoukei (i.e. continuative) form, and so can imply 'dying'.

I wholeheartedly agree with the terminology question. Does anyone know how it came to be that Western go terminology got it so wrong? (Someone called killing capturing to sound nicer, but others didn't care and still called uncaptured stones dead instead of "on trial" or whatever euphemism you can imagine?)

My personal pet-peeve is "move". Why move when the stones are obviously not moving but staying at their place? My first introduction to Go was by a text that called them "hands", unfortunately I rarely have seen it elsewhere.



Seriously, area scoring emphasizes "the life of the soldiers" - the number of remaining soldiers is the score after all - and doesn't disregard them for some abstract "territory". If I had time I could add quotations from luminaries like Clausewitz or Mao on the subject ... the whole mindset of "defending territory" is a misconception / bad habit not only in Go.

@Robert: So, you agree it is more intuitive (when I reformulate the sentence). Yippie. You are an area scoring person yourself, after all.

Chess pieces that are removed from the board are often called "captured", I think we just borrowed it.

For a couple of years, I have consistently used "removal" for "[a play] taking stones off the board" and "capture" for "[a play] changing the status from unsettled to dead". In English go terminology, "prisoner" has the clear meaning "stones already taken off the board", so I have not seen any need to change it.

So sad, obviously political correctness started some hundred years earlier than we thought it did. Yet, all chess players say "king (is) dead" to end the game.

Actually, the term check mate derives from the Persian "shah mat", which means "the king (shah) is defeated (mat)" (but not dead). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checkmate#Etymology