Life In 19x19

John Fairbairn wrote:

So you are saying that the division by 2 occurred before the change to subtraction from 180½?

No. (Can you honestly imagine those words in MY mouth ?).

I'm sure I've explained it all clearly enough, but I recognise everyone in a forum, me included, only ever skim reads, so I'll try a different tack.

A result is achieved by a simple count of stones that shows e.g. B+1. Somebody has come along in ancient China and ADDED a procedure to make that B+0.5. I am the one asking when the division occurred, but most of all I am asking WHY?

Ancient China. 18th century?

What procedure? Here we have a group tax, but a win by ½. Rereading your original post, I find no procedure. AFAICT, someone came along and altered the score, for reasons and by a procedure unknown.

You ask why. I at least came up with a possible explanation.

AFAICT, someone came along and altered the score, for reasons and by a procedure unknown.

Thank you. That is enough for me to know. If the experts don't know of a procedure, or know of one but don't know why or how it was implemented, I can feel I'm not having a senior moment.

John Fairbairn wrote:

AFAICT, someone came along and altered the score, for reasons and by a procedure unknown.

Thank you. That is enough for me to know. If the experts don't know of a procedure, or know of one but don't know why or how it was implemented, I can feel I'm not having a senior moment.

I was just repeating what I thought you had said.

Maybe you and I should take up shuffleboard.

The previous reply is about the origin of WeiQi.

The answer to the question is simple.

Both sides divide the basic eyes position equally, it only needs to be compared with 180.5,
just counting the pieces of one side simplifies the time and process of judging the outcome.
That's all.

The maths and analysis of this are a bit beyond me, but untangling the word "primitive" from "simple" might give you another line of reasoning to try and figure out what game was being played with the scores.

In evolutionary biology "primitive" means "similar to the common ancestor," not "simpler."

For example, modern Japanese and American Go rulesets branched from early-20th Century Japanese Go. Both rule sets have changed since then, but one will be more similar to the rules of early 20th Century Japanese Go. This is the more primitive ruleset in that regard. It isn't by necessity the Japanese set.

The most important thing to take away from evolutionary thinking is that all modern rule sets are equally related to the "original" ancient version of the game. So Modern Chinese rules aren't more likely to be the most primitive in this sense just because of shared geography. If Korean rules branched early and haven't changed much, they might be a better place to look for clues about ancient Go.

To work out the ancient ruleset you would need to look at the entire pool of modern and historical rulesets that are available and trace the branches of relatedness where we can. This might start to give a family tree that can point towards some likely ruleset for the original.

This is how linguists reconstructed proto-Indo-European vocab. I don't see why it wouldn't work in theory for a scoring ruleset.

WriterJon wrote:The maths and analysis of this are a bit beyond me, but untangling the word "primitive" from "simple" might give you another line of reasoning to try and figure out what game was being played with the scores.

In evolutionary biology "primitive" means "similar to the common ancestor," not "simpler."

For example, modern Japanese and American Go rulesets branched from early-20th Century Japanese Go.

No. Modern AGA rules are derived from modern Chinese go. I know, because I wrote the article in the AGA Journal in 1977 about modern Chinese go that set the stage for the rules that were later adopted. I introduced the idea of pass stones, which I called bookkeeping stones, to leave the same number of stones of each player on the board during counting phase, so that the area (Chinese) score could be counted by counting territory, which is what American players were used to, from Japanese go. I do not think that I was the first person to think of pass stones.

WriterJon wrote:To work out the ancient ruleset you would need to look at the entire pool of modern and historical rulesets that are available and trace the branches of relatedness where we can. This might start to give a family tree that can point towards some likely ruleset for the original.

There is no written rule set before 1949. As for ancient rules, the earliest known description of go suggests that stones were counted. The earliest known scored game records are consistent with counting territory with a group tax. Since one form of stone counting that persisted into the 20th century had a group tax, it was once thought that a group tax was a feature of stone counting, but we now know that that is not the case. A group tax is also a feature of no pass go with territory counting. It is unclear whether a group tax was a feature of the most ancient form of go. The text is ambiguous, at best.