jaeup wrote:Bill Spight wrote:
IMHO, rules cleverness is not a plus. And one example is using passes to end play. Instead of saying, "Please keep playing," say something like "I don't have a play," or "Shall we stop?" That signals that you are ready to end play. OTOH, you might say, "I can't take the ko," in which case you are not proposing to end play.
OC, if passes do not lift ko or superko bans, then you can get moonshine life positions. There are non-clever ways to handle that problem, such as Yasunaga's three pass rule or Ing's four pass rule.
Are you familiar with Button Go (
https://senseis.xmp.net/?ButtonGo ). It is possible to implement button go using the first pass for the button, in which case it is necessary to have the first pass life ko bans but not have any effect on ending play.
I was mentioning cleverness of the rulemaker, not the player. I know players are quite ignorant to the actual rule, so when I devise a rule, I try hard for the players to play normally while the rule takes care of all the possible anomalies and trolling that a wicked rule theoretician may imagine and try.
I appreciate that. But I agree with Ikeda that chasing anomalies is like playing Whackamole. (OC, Whackamole came after Ikeda.
) Ing's 1975 rules were simple and clear. One problem was that the superko rule could tax human ability to recognize a long cycle. But some superkos produced what Ing considered to be anomalies. He cleverly dealt with those anomalies and produced difficult to understand rules. The Japanese also produced difficult rules, J89, to deal with anomalies. Whackamole!
I know lifting ko ban after two passes is the source of many anomalies. Someday I will explain how a rule can be designed to avoid them. Yeah, that explanation took a whole book of 360 pages (with some exaggeration).
Both Yasunaga and Ing dealt with the issue, and I have also addressed it in various ways. For one simple way see
https://senseis.xmp.net/?SpightRules .
The oldest known rules question is that of Moonshine Life. If you think in terms of life and death, it is anomalous in that a position with an obvious false eye can live because of a ko ban. But both Shusai and Go Seigen accepted ending play with a ko ban in effect, and even the AGA rules allow play to end in a kind of Moonshine Life position, because of the two pass rule. IMO there is a problem with overloading the pass. You seem to have a similar view.
The Japanese 1949 rules did not go along with Shusai's and Go Seigen's view about ending play. Instead they did not allow a ko banned position to remain on the board. That eliminated Moonshine Life positions. Ing rules stop play after two passes, but allow resumption without a ko ban. That also eliminates Moonshine Life positions.
From the more general standpoint of evaluation, which includes questions of life and death, a position with a score should maintain that score in subsequent play, regardless of who plays first. Since a ko ban prevents a player from playing first from the banned position, there should be no ko bans in the final position of a game. That principle eliminates Moonshine Life, as well as other, similar positions. From this viewpoint it is not the lifting of the ko ban that produces anomalies, but just the opposite: not lifting the ko ban.
The rationale for my simple rule, which I came up with in the 1990s, was this. If we allow passes to life ko and superko bans, we may get a repetition of the same position with the same player to play, with a ko ban in effect. In that case, if the player passed before, his opponent was unable, with no ko ban, to improve his score. Nor, OC, was the player who was forced to pass able to improve his score. So we may accept the current score as final.
OC, this may run afoul of the scoring rules, as distinct from the playing rules, so we may continue play to satisfy those rules in an encore.
For instance, for scoring purposes it may be desirable to capture all dead stones, so play may continue for that purpose. Doing so eliminates any problems with dead stones facing dead stones, for instance. Edit: It may also be desirable, for scoring purposes, to fill all one way dame in sekis, so that they will not be counted as territory under Japanese or Korean rules.
