Anything other than a 1 moku is a loss.

[Elom]

"No b*** ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making some other poor dumb b*** die for his country."

If you have a group you clearly kill in Go without equivalent compensation, you kill it. If you're playing to play the best Go you can, you're also implicitly playing to win. If you're 20 points ahead and he self ataris a group, capture it.

The alternative is to play deliberately bad moves, which IMO can never be considered an attitude with which perfect Go is all that likely

AlphaGo.

[topazg]

"No b*** ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making some other poor dumb b*** die for his country."

If you have a group you clearly kill in Go without equivalent compensation, you kill it. If you're playing to play the best Go you can, you're also implicitly playing to win. If you're 20 points ahead and he self ataris a group, capture it.

The alternative is to play deliberately bad moves, which IMO can never be considered an attitude with which perfect Go is all that likely

AlphaGo.

Yeah, that's not really a counter-argument. I can promise you that if AlphaGo has the ability to cleanly capture a 20 stone group, it will, as its proxy for determining "good play" is an improved win %, which a massive capture would increase substantially.

[Elom]

"No b*** ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making some other poor dumb b*** die for his country."

If you have a group you clearly kill in Go without equivalent compensation, you kill it. If you're playing to play the best Go you can, you're also implicitly playing to win. If you're 20 points ahead and he self ataris a group, capture it.

The alternative is to play deliberately bad moves, which IMO can never be considered an attitude with which perfect Go is all that likely

AlphaGo.

Yeah, that's not really a counter-argument. I can promise you that if AlphaGo has the ability to cleanly capture a 20 stone group, it will, as its proxy for determining "good play" is an improved win %, which a massive capture would increase substantially.

I know, it couldn't be a worthy counter argument-- but somehow, I feel If alphago could capture 20 stones while letting black make a useless or weak attempt at killing a much larger group that would lose the game if captured, if the situation was that the position was in the very late endgame and it thought it had a 99.9982756% percent chance of winning by "protecting" it's large group, and thought there was a 99.9982755% chance it large group would survive if it captured 20 stones, it would "protect" it's weak group. Bizarre.

Actually I recommend this style of play for players-- especially those weaker than around 15 kyu,-- who are frustrated by opponent's who, at the end of a game they are losing, play "hopeless" moves in "secure" territory, and then suddenly win!

This is only for the sake of frustrated players being less fustated by adopting the Alpha-Style-- the Beta-Style (Maybe that would be the style of, "Beta-Go" if it's created ) is to capture the 20 stones, and take the attitude that if you allow an opponent to live in "secure territory" or capture "safe stones", you deserve to lose the game for being so careless and shouldn't feel bad, taking their attitude as just "not giving up" to feel better. This is because if you are ahead by so much that you feel that your opponent should have "obviously" resigned, you shouldn't feel you have to apply the "1 moku rule", I feel.

[sigger]

In making this a goal, my motivation is to better understand the whole concept of "exchange" and how to make even exchanges whenever needed, even when the advantages being exchanged are completely different from each other.

More theoretically speaking, I'll repeat what I've already said in the thread: The easiest and most fool-proof plan you can come up with to win is the one that allows your opponent as much as you can possible allow him to have, short of letting him win. Your opponent wants control of more than half the board. Your plan should be to let him have 180 points, while erring on the side of less than that.

I suggest that the exchanges are not necessarily limited to the board. We think of negotiations with stones: you get life, I get a wall of influence. But also: you kill my group, I learn more about go - an exchange of sorts at the meta level. This makes me a stronger player and the next time we collaborate on a game, it will be closer to perfect.

Another way to think of it. I make a mistake. You play back to allow me to recover. But I see this as verification that my move was correct since you are stronger than I am. In effect, you have helped make me a weaker player and the next time we collaborate, our game will be further from perfect.

[daal]

The problem with considering anything but a one point win a loss, is that it attempts to apply Grand Theoretical Principles (balance, harmony, etc.) to the messy world of real-life amateur go. While I agree that it probably has some validity for the likes of Alphago, when people of lower caliber try to put it into effect, our propensity for error turns it into a laughable undertaking. Communism was a great idea too until they tried it out in the real world.