Life In 19x19

jts wrote:

elegantly

pass stones

I think it's more elegant than the alternatives I've seen, like the World Mind Sports Games rules, which require you to keep track of who made the first pass and make a 0 or 1 komi adjustment based on who passes first.

With pass stones, you can say, "both players get an equal number of moves, and it is this fact that allows both area and territory counting and allows play out to resolve L&D disputes."

Here's another reason AGA rules are cool. If you do the math and adjust for the 7.5 komi, the score is always B+1.5, B+3.5, etc. or W+0.5, W+2.5, etc. Other parities are not possible unless there are an odd number of points in seki (rare) or maybe some other pathological weirdness. So if you're scoring an AGA game and come up with a result like B+0.5 or W+1.5, it might be a good idea to have a recount, because it's likely someone made a mistake. I actually see miscounts fairly often even with experienced players. People are tired at the end of a game, and doing arithmetic that involves both multiplication and addition is often unreliable. Also, prisoners fall of the board, etc. Stuff happens. I wish people would just accept area scoring, but so many have never been taught it even though it's simpler. People complain that area scoring is slower. If I were cynical, I'd think they'd rather get the wrong answer in a minute and a half rather than the right one in two minutes. More likely it's just that amateurs don't care about the result that much if it's close because they know if it's that close the result is pretty much random. Or maybe they just think they are better at scoring than they really are, the same way that 95% of drivers think they are above average.

I think it's just as easy to make mistakes in area scoring. Some of your groups of 10 stones could accidentally become groups of nine stones, stones can fall off the board unnoticed while trying to sort them into groups of ten, you can miscount the number of groups of 10 you have, etc.

Dusk Eagle wrote:I think it's just as easy to make mistakes in area scoring. Some of your groups of 10 stones could accidentally become groups of nine stones, stones can fall off the board unnoticed while trying to sort them into groups of ten, you can miscount the number of groups of 10 you have, etc.

Certainly these mistakes can happen, but the potential set of territory scoring mistakes is larger. And one problem with territory scoring (lost or extra prisoners) could occur at any time during the game, not just during scoring. In area scoring, there is also the factor that usually only one color is counted, which allows both players to pay more attention to what is going on.

Area scoring is not perfect, but I do think it's better.

Now you make me curious. How do you actually do area counting, so it's more accurate than territory counting?

In territory counting, you just rearrange the territory in 10s, 20s, if necessary 5s, and so on. Since you can fill in prisoners, the territory gets less, reducing the work you have to do when counting, and as additional bonus, increasing the leeway you have in rearranging. Rearranging in multiples of 10 makes counting mistakes improbable. And rearranging is easy, since you have lots of stones that are not counted, so you can move them without shifting any borders. The shape of the stones at the end is irrelevant, only the territory needs to be in convenient groups.

How would you do the equivalent in area counting? When you have to count both territory and stones, how can you rearrange anything without shifting the borders? And without rearranging to convenient groups, you're just asking for mistakes.

flOvermind wrote:Now you make me curious. How do you actually do area counting, so it's more accurate than territory counting?

In territory counting, you just rearrange the territory in 10s, 20s, if necessary 5s, and so on. Since you can fill in prisoners, the territory gets less, reducing the work you have to do when counting, and as additional bonus, increasing the leeway you have in rearranging. Rearranging in multiples of 10 makes counting mistakes improbable. And rearranging is easy, since you have lots of stones that are not counted, so you can move them without shifting any borders. The shape of the stones at the end is irrelevant, only the territory needs to be in convenient groups.

How would you do the equivalent in area counting? When you have to count both territory and stones, how can you rearrange anything without shifting the borders? And without rearranging to convenient groups, you're just asking for mistakes.

see sensei's

it looks somewhat tricky, but actually it is quite logical. you count empty intersections like during territory scoring (while taking advantage in possible 'rounding' the count by adding/removing stones), remember the number and rearrange stones into piles of ten to conveniently count them. then add the two numbers

(not that i would ever tried it)

So basically what you do in area counting is separately counting the territory and the stones, and then add the numbers.
That's opposed to the territory counting, where you first fill in the prisoners and then count the territory.

I don't see where these supposed error sources should come from in territory counting.

Filling in the prisoners is a mechanical step with little chance of making mistake, and the method for the respective "count the territory" steps is exactly the same. But counting the stones is an additional source of errors. So if anything, area counting would be more prone to making mistakes.

One point in favor of area counting is that *both* players count one color, as opposed to each player rearranging a separate color for counting. Perhaps this makes it more difficult to deliberately cheat?