worthless dame but able to play inside territory?

[DrStraw]

I actually agree with you on this point. It's more interesting to have to be sure of whether reinforcement is needed. The thing is, you still have to be sure under area counting, because playing inside your own territory costs you what you would have gained from playing elsewhere, such as a dame point. If all dame have already been filled, then that means your opponent didn't see your weakness anyway. The case where it is correct to protect a weakness (such as where your opponent could do some series of ataris to capture a couple stones) only after all other possible moves have been exhausted seems to be a tiny percentage of games, no? EDIT: On second thought, you could play such a move whenever there are an even number of dame remaining. Still, it seems unusual to get to even that point before it becomes correct for your opponent to take advantage of your weakness.

If you go back and look at my post it says "after all dame are filled". That last dame could be the crucial move which fills the last liberty and makes a defense necessary. Before that the opponent's play might not have worked. Admittedly, it is a small percentage of all games, but that does not obviate my point.

[MountainGo]

That last dame could be the crucial move which fills the last liberty and makes a defense necessary. Before that the opponent's play might not have worked. Admittedly, it is a small percentage of all games, but that does not obviate my point.

Aah, I didn't pick up on your implication that our hypothetical move might only work once all dame are filled. That's an excellent point, and it doesn't seem all that unusual. This renders even more appealing the rules options that use territory scoring but compensate for playing inside one's own territory during an "encore" phase, which seems like the best of both worlds.

[Bantari]

Pardon me for butting in, but...

I am not sure I understand this whole discussion.
The question was simple: Can a rule set be devised such that (A) and (B).

I read post after post, and among all this verbiage, not even the esteemed rule gurus, who otherwise love discussing every quirk of every detail no matter how theoretical for hours to no end - not even they seem to be attempting to answer the question. Why? I find the question interesting and understand where the OP is coming from.

Personally, I do not see such rules being possible.
But I'm not a rules guru, so what do I know...
Would be nice if I was wrong, for once.

[Harleqin]

Well, what he seems to effectively ask for is a rule set where not only dame, but also teire are not worth anything. This would be a huge deviation from Go, something in the direction of Sunjang Baduk.

[RobertJasiek]

DrStraw, under territory scoring rulesets, being lazy and defending without knowing whether it is necessary is possible and I do it regularly, especially in time trouble. E.g., when one is ahead by more than 1 point, one can make lazy defending moves. E.g., when there are 1+ adjacent dame, a group might already be in danger - not only with exactly 0 adjacent dame. So do you dislike not only area scoring but also territory scoring rulesets because BOTH allow laziness? Thought to the end, you would want a ruleset that requires a player to make perfect play moves during the entire game, starting from move 1 of the game.

Contrarily, I am happy with rules that allow the players to play correctly or to make mistakes at any moment because Go is a game of mental competition, which includes mistakes.

If players were required to play perfectly, then we might not play at all but would only be studying Go on a theoretical level until the puzzle would be solved centuries later.

[Bill Spight]

Pardon me for butting in, but...

I am not sure I understand this whole discussion.
The question was simple: Can a rule set be devised such that (A) and (B).

I read post after post, and among all this verbiage, not even the esteemed rule gurus, who otherwise love discussing every quirk of every detail no matter how theoretical for hours to no end - not even they seem to be attempting to answer the question. Why? I find the question interesting and understand where the OP is coming from.

Personally, I do not see such rules being possible.
But I'm not a rules guru, so what do I know...
Would be nice if I was wrong, for once.

Well, what are (A) and (B)?

1.) It does not cost you a point to play inside your own territory. This way you do not need any Japanese-style rules to define what is alive and what is dead, because you can always play things out (in real, non-hypothetical play) when there is disagreement.
2.) Filling in dame is worthless. This seems like silly busy-work at the end of the game when you'd rather it just be over, not to mention the possibilities for silly blunders when you don't see an atari, etc.

Harleqin mentions Sunjang Baduk, which uses a kind of territory scoring where it does not cost a point to play inside your own territory, because for counting all stones are cleared out of territory except for boundary stones. However, in the two main variants of go, area scoring and territory scoring, a dame is worth one point more than an unnecessary play inside territory. In those terms, (A) and (B) are incompatible.

However, if you recognize that (A) and (B) can refer to two different phases of play, then you can arrange it so that the first phase is by territory rules, so that filling dame is worthless, and the second phase (the encore) is by, in effect, area rules, so that filling territory does not cost a point. Lasker-Maas rules do that by playing the encore using captured stones. Pretty clever!

Double button go addresses the issues in a different way. It uses territory scoring, so, (B), playing a dame is worthless. Technically, an unnecessary play inside territory costs a point, but the use of the second button means that it does not matter. For instance, suppose that White has just played the first button, passing the Black button (stone) to Black, and the score on the board is jigo. First, let both players pass and then Black plays the second button, giving the White stone to White. Result: jigo. Second, let Black fill a point of territory, and then both players pass and then White plays the second button, passing the White stone to Black. Black gets one less point of territory, but also gets a White prisoner. Result: jigo. In effect, it does not cost Black a point to play inside his own territory.