Sneegurd wrote:It depends on a ruleset a bit (with chinese rules you don't lose points by playing inside your own territory, so this aspect is easier to grasp for beginners). Here black has to be careful not to end in seki, but generally if white plays in his territory, black can say (to himself) "no, you cannot kill me or make seki" and pass. If white continues, he can ignore until it threatens his life and then capture white. Notice that even then he doesn't need to physically capture every white stone, if they don't have chance to live / kill black. If white doesn't agree with him, they can play the situation out.
OK, but if I wouldn't agree as white, I mean if I insist on "you cannot kill me" (even if I know better) we have to play it out. Then black will kill white, but to achieve this, he needs to play inside his territory. And with japanese rules, he loses points then! Is that right?
This worries beginners a lot. I think it helps to understand the original rules of the game and what the "Japanese" rules (i.e. the rules developed during the Tang) and the "Chinese" rules (i.e., the rules developed during the Qing) are trying to accomplish.
Originally the goal of go was to get more stones of your color on the final board. The board was completely filled, except (almost certainly) for the two eye spaces required for each group to live, and the stones of each color were counted up. Of course, for this stone-filling game to work, you need to have a capture rule; otherwise, as the players alternate placing tiles, the first mover will always win by one. But once you have a capture rule, the goal of the game becomes to have the stones you place now protect spaces that your opponent can't play on without being captured (or risking capture). That way you can fill in as many of the open, unprotected spaces as you can, and then still have more protected spaces inside your group to fill in at the end.
To beginners and GnuGo, this way of playing was probably very reassuring. To people who have been playing for a while, though, it is both boring and a bit inelegant. Once all of the spaces than can be protected from the opponent's stones are protected, then you split the remaining points that can't be protected evenly down the middle (the person who takes the first worthless middle space might sometimes get one more point here than the person who takes the second worthless space); then you have to completely fill in your own territory with your own stones. Boring, right? What's going to happen is a foregone conclusion.
So sometime around the Tang period, go players introduced an innovation. They just stopped filling in the almost-worthless points in the middle that didn't protect any extra spaces, and didn't count them for either side; and they stopped filling in the protected spaces, and just counted them for the side that surrounded them. And, making, things even easier, instead of having your stones that are still on the board count towards your score, they had your stones that were captured or doomed to capture count against your score. It comes out to the same thing (with one small difference), and allows you to dump the captures inside your own group to easily calculate the score at the end. --- As you have already guessed by now, this is the form in which Go went to Japan and thence to the West. We call the protected areas that used to get filled in at the end of the game "territory" and the least-valuable points which didn't affect territory or the life of groups "dame".
But you can see that this change wasn't really intended to affect anything other than the boring, inelegant stone filling stage at the end of the game. People were not supposed to have disputes about which stones were alive and dead once there were no more moves left that effect territory/captures. Indeed, experienced players know that if the life and death of the stones was in question, the player who claims they are alive would be desperate to keep playing, so as to give them two distinct eyes or capture enemy stones. With very few exceptions, when a player is claiming that his opponent has to make more moves to capture, but he refuses to play any more stones on the board himself, he is acting in bad faith.
However, there are a few exceptions that are genuinely confusing even to experienced beginners, and in the Japanese system they came up with a special set of rules to resolve them.
The Chinese rules came later. They're very similar to the Japanese rules, except that they do fill in the dame and do not keep track of captures. So, like the Japanese rules, the Chinese rules call for counting empty territory that was originally filled in, but instead of having captures count against territory, they stones on the board added to territory. It's the same thing, remember - each player has usually played the same number of stones, +/-1, so stones on the board plus dead stones for black equals on the board plus dead for white. Because the stones on the board count again, you get an advantage from filling in all the worthless spaces in the middle of the board. What's true under Japanese rules is true under Chinese: if your opponent insists that you need to captures his stones at the end and isn't willing to play more stones on the board himself, he's probably acting in bad faith. But because under Chinese it doesn't matter anyway, you can just keep playing and adding more stones inside your own territory to make the opponent happy.
Summary: The original rules involved filling in the entire board. Everyone agrees that's boring. We now have two different rulesets that implement the idea of not filling in the whole board. The result should be the same (+/- 1 point) in almost every single game of go. A good move in Japanese rules is equally good under Chinese, and vice versa. Their only disagreement is what to do once all the territory is settled. In Japanese rules you stop, and resolve disputes about which groups are dead by not being an cad. (Hehe, cad gets filtered to cad.) In Chinese rules you split the dame and resolve disputes by plunking stones down on the board until you've filled in your entire territory, if that's what it takes to convince you're opponent to be a good sport.
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