A realization about Go

[NickBentley]

I had a realization about a Go-like game I invented, which led to a realization about Go itself. Curious what Go players think. See here.

[Bill Spight]

I quickly looked at the new rules. One observation stood out to me.

"There’s no explicit territory definition. Territory emerges from the rules."

I think that that is a result of not having passes. That is the case with go. Nearly every variant of go without passes has some emergent concept of territory. The concepts of territory may differ, depending upon the rules.

[luigi]

I quickly looked at the new rules. One observation stood out to me.

"There’s no explicit territory definition. Territory emerges from the rules."

I think that that is a result of not having passes. That is the case with go. Nearly every variant of go without passes has some emergent concept of territory. The concepts of territory may differ, depending upon the rules.

The main insight (first presented in this game, as far as I know) is that capture scoring plus suicide enabled equals area scoring minus group tax (parity issues in tied games aside).

For reference, No Pass Go is quite different from Go with area scoring in that captures are half as worth in the former. Not so in Blooms!

(I'm the Luis mentioned in the article.)

[HermanHiddema]

What you call Free Go is basically equivalent to what is called Capture Go. Capture Go is generally taught with the goal of capturing 1 stone, then capture X stones for increasing values of X. It has a similar effect of arriving at the concept of territory naturally for large enough values of X.

[Bill Spight]

I quickly looked at the new rules. One observation stood out to me.

"There’s no explicit territory definition. Territory emerges from the rules."

I think that that is a result of not having passes. That is the case with go. Nearly every variant of go without passes has some emergent concept of territory. The concepts of territory may differ, depending upon the rules.

The main insight (first presented in this game, as far as I know) is that capture scoring plus suicide enabled equals area scoring minus group tax (parity issues in tied games aside).

Capture-1 with suicide enabled (no pass) equals territory scoring with a group tax.

Capture-N with suicide allows suicide of up to N-1 stones, which may produce values unknown in other forms of go.

For reference, No Pass Go is quite different from Go with area scoring in that captures are half as worth in the former.

No Pass Go produces fractional territory values, not just half point values. No Pass Go with suicide produces infinitesimal territory values.

Not so in Blooms!

Different no pass rules may produce different definitions of territory.

Edit:

Quote from the site:

"For sufficiently large values of X {the number of captures to win}, the game is like the original game: it evolves until only living blooms remain, and the leader at that point wins. It’s basically equivalent to area scoring (with a 3-point group tax)."

If the eyes are single point eyes, when there are no dame each player will sacrifice only one stone per move. At that point the game may be scored by territory scoring with a 3 pt. group tax. (With larger eyes the concept of territory may be different, as I mentioned above.)