Commentary on the Korean 2013 Rules

[RobertJasiek]

My commentary on the Korean 2013 Rules is available:

http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/k2013c.pdf

The document includes citations of relevant parts of the rules and their appendices, a detailed commentary, a correction of the rules, a suggestion of Simplified Korean Rules and examples for them. For this purpose, I have invented the pragmatic concepts 'basic-life' and 'independent region'. While official Korean rules are very complicated under their surface and hide parts of their complications on the surface, my simplifying model shows that they imply a core, with which most of the complexity can be replaced by applicable concepts.

[John Fairbairn]

Additional note: I am aware that East Asian educational culture uses teaching by examples a lot. However, in rules or law texts, such an approach is wrong.

If you understand (and apparently accept) that Asian educational culture is different from ours, surely you can understand that legal culture is also different. In Japan, in particular, recourse to courts is avoided in favour of negotiated compromise. We have the same idea in western divorce cases where great attempts are made to solve problems out of court, irrespective of what the laws may say. This is often the benefit of others, e.g. the children in divorce cases. The go analogy might be that negotiating problem cases, or leaving them to a Solomonic arbiter, on the basis of simple rules texts makes life easier for the great mass of players. As has been observed repeatedly, this approach works very, very well in practice. If something works so well, it's hard to say it's wrong.

[pwaldron]

If you understand (and apparently accept) that Asian educational culture is different from ours, surely you can understand that legal culture is also different. In Japan, in particular, recourse to courts is avoided in favour of negotiated compromise.

Indeed. Even within the legal frameworks of the Western world there differing philosophies. In Canada, Quebec uses the original French civil law, in which the core principles are codified a priori. This sounds like what Robert espouses. The remainder of Canada uses (British) common law, where the core principles have been laid down over time by the precedents set by previous court decisions. Both provide perfectly viable frameworks to make decisions.

[Bill Spight]

I have been unable to find a link to these rules, nor any mention of new rules on the Korean Baduk Association web site (in the English pages, anyway). It would be interesting to see the full document, and to find out whether in fact the KBA has adopted new rules.

[RobertJasiek]

I have the full documents here and was told that they were the current Korean Rules. Unfortunately, I do not know if they are public domain, so I cannot upload them at the moment.

[RobertJasiek]

As I have learnt now, despite "Korean Rules" in their title, these are not the Korean Rules. Instead, the Asian Games 2013 Rules and their two Attachments were set by the Asian Go Federation and were used for the 4th Asian Games in 2013. See the changed preface in my now corrected commentary:

http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/AsianGamesR ... entary.pdf

The rules documents are available now:

http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/AsianGamesRules.pdf
http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/AsianGamesR ... hment1.pdf
http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/AsianGamesR ... hment2.pdf

[asura]

Interesting rules. It's nice that local ko threats are valid and a self contained moonshine ko can live. Though this concept of "local" might be harder to formalize than in Japanese rules.

[RobertJasiek]

Both Japanese local-2 and Asian Games local (should) depend on "force", so they are in the same difficulty class. I needed much more time to decipher local-2 simply because it was the first non-trivial local concept for which I had to make a breakthrough in research. For writing the commentary, I needed "only" about 4 weeks, because I could apply my prior research knowledge and experience. Without first solving the Japanese rules, I am not sure if I could have "solved" the Korean style rules at all; they are more inconsistent with their implicit conceptual background.

[Bill Spight]

Thank you, Robert, for the links to the rules texts. It really helps.

Edit: Hmmm. It looks like these rules are a variant of the Ing rules.

Brief comment:

"The number of liberties of a contiguous group is the sum of liberties of each stone in the group" (p. 5).

That statement is false, and they even give an example without noticing that.

(;ST[2]SZ[19]AP[GOWrite:2.2.21]CA[ISO8859-1]FF[4]GM[1]PB[ ]L[dd][ed][de]AB[dd][ed][de]MA[dc][ec][fd][ee][df][ce][cd]PW[ ]FG[259:]GN[ ]PM[2])

These stones together have 7 liberties. The D-16 stone has 2 liberties, the D-15 stone has 3 liberties, and the E-16 stone has 3 liberties. 2 + 3 + 3 = 8. Tilt!

[asura]

Both Japanese local-2 and Asian Games local (should) depend on "force", so they are in the same difficulty class.

That seems to be true if you compare it to j2003 (I need to think about).
But I have created a model for j1989 with a much more easy and (imo) more elegant way than the local-1 and local-2 concept of the j2003 rules.

However for this ruleset it doesn't work and (atm) I think it cannot be simply changed to cover it. (EDIT: I made a thinking mistake there. It rather seems that the opposite is right.)

[jts]

Brief comment:

"The number of liberties of a contiguous group is the sum of liberties of each stone in the group" (p. 5).

That statement is false, and they even give an example without noticing that.

I assume they mean "the number is the sum of (liberties of each stone in the group)", rather than "the number is (the sum of liberties of) each stone in the group". Since a liberty for them is an intersection (a spot on the board, not a characteristic of a group), it makes sense that they are thinking of a collection of intersections, rather than of sigma(liberties of stone i)_i=1ⁿ

[Bill Spight]

Brief comment:

"The number of liberties of a contiguous group is the sum of liberties of each stone in the group" (p. 5).

That statement is false, and they even give an example without noticing that.

I assume they mean "the number is the sum of (liberties of each stone in the group)", rather than "the number is (the sum of liberties of) each stone in the group". Since a liberty for them is an intersection (a spot on the board, not a characteristic of a group), it makes sense that they are thinking of a collection of intersections, rather than of sigma(liberties of stone i)_i=1ⁿ

Of course they were thinking about a collection of intersections, but that's not what they said. "(the sum of liberties of)" does not parse. Besides, summation is not the process by which we find the number of liberties of the group. Counting is.

What they meant, I suppose, is that the set of liberties of the group is the union of the sets of liberties of each stone. The number of liberties of the group is the cardinality of that set. OC, by then they have lost their audience.

[RobertJasiek]

asura, it is easy to design easy models, but the question is always: do they model (Japanese rules) so that all examples behave as they were meant to behave? J2003 I have tested successfully.

[asura]

It was not that easy to make it as easy as possible and still working in all cases. In fact I started with more complicated models and created new models out of this that were (almost) dominat smaller or simpler.

Of corse you're right about testing and that's the weakest spot for my model.
I have tested it only on a small number of positions and concentrated mainly on special cases. (Because it's more interesting - but for practise the reverse would be more important, of corse)

I like to beleave my model always works as intended by j1989, but I'm somewhat unsure because it only uses a quite simple pattern for life and death and I might have overlooked cases that are different.

[asura]

Anyway, the starting point was that I said this rules (local ko threats) are more complicated than j1989 (ko-pass).
When you say both can be modeled with local-1/2 why does this automaticly imply both are same complex?