This is all they have: "All uncapturable stones are alive and all capturable stones are dead".

What you are thinking is correct. They are asking for the complete control of the territory you are claiming. i.e. capture all the opponent's stones in the hypothetical play. Your stone being temporarily captured in that process does not matter. The final owner of the region matters. Of course, none of these are written in the rule text. You must guess everything from the above one sentence.


The Japanese rule pretends that you can play anywhere on the board during the hypothetical play, which made the special pass rule inevitable. But, now we know that "playing anywhere" is not really a good idea because there are ways to abuse such a rule. Once we decide to restrict the playable area, the special pass rule is not mandatory. Its removal is probably the right direction.


Well, I think it is probably impossible to eliminate "dead stones vs dead stones" situation by slightly modifying the hypothetical play rule. It happens in both Japanese and Korean rules. The ruleset must say something when it occurs whether one likes it or not, and treating it effectively like a seki is a reasonable conclusion. (Though, technically, it is an anti-seki not seki)


I do not agree that it is a good feature, especially for a territory scoring rule. You may want to make a pass just because you ran out of ko threats and no dame is left to be filled. The rulemakers of Korea hinted that it is the situation that "a pass is necessary", and they are likely to accept a pass in that situation. Not surprisingly, they never formally defined the term "necessary".

My preference is to introduce two types of passes, one for the ko capture and one for the game end. Some clever thoughts must be added to prevent abusing such a rule. The last chapter of my book introduces such a ruleset. (I will introduce it again when the book translation is finished. For now, only the rule text is available in English without the commentary.)

_________________
Jaeup Kim
Professor in Physics, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, Korea
Author of the Book "Understanding the Rules of Baduk", available at https://home.unist.ac.kr/professor/jukim/bbs/board.php?bo_table=notice&wr_id=5

Instead of complicating the rules by introducing special rules (such as different types of passes), the aim should be to have the same rules for regular play and playout. It is, however, impossible for territory scoring without pass-fights: they closest I have come up with is the Simplified Japanese Rules: http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/sj.html Nevertheless, further complications should be avoided.

You don't have to just guess. You can use your experience with life and death in play and problems. One reason, I think, that Western rules tend to be clear is that they are written for people with no experience.



It isn't just that localization is not easy to define, it is that sometimes it is nearly impossible. It also changes the nature of the game. That is, kos, by their nature break localization. Why should kos in hypothetical play adhere to localization. (I know why that decision has been made, but it is not necessary. You can have an encore in which ko threats may be removed. Hypothetical play is especially problematic for inexperienced players.)



Again, it is something that alters the nature of the game, and drastically so. Perhaps it arose as a clever way to enforce not passing unnecessarily without saying so. But it has had unintended consequences. (At least I hope they were unintended.)



Actually, there is a deep connection between no pass baduk and territory, in that some concept of territory emerges from not passing, although these concepts may differ depending upon the form of no pass baduk. (See https://lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.php?p=197451#p197451 ) If only necessary passes are allowed, a pass is necessary if a play would reduce one's territory, or if there is no legal play.

IMX, some rules beasts arise because someone made an unnecessary pass. Eliminate unnecessary passes and you eliminate those beasts.



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.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Bill, since you know the Korean reason for local hypothetical play, tell us! (I can guess but I do not know.)

Mandatory perfect play on passing is a nightmare for clarification but the real problem is: go is competition of mistakes. Why allow mistakes on plays but prohibit mistakes on passes? Inconsistent! Oh, I get the professional intention: they want to move the first moment of perfect play clarification to the earliest possible moment, and, because perfect play is the easiest aspect of go;) , start alleged relaxation as early as possible.

I simply meant that the guesses I made were educated by experience. They were not just guesses.



You can do that if you do not overload passing by using passes to end play. As I said, using passes to end play is too clever, IMO. Letting play end prematurely causes problems that require complicated rules.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

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 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).

_________________
Jaeup Kim
Professor in Physics, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, Korea
Author of the Book "Understanding the Rules of Baduk", available at https://home.unist.ac.kr/professor/jukim/bbs/board.php?bo_table=notice&wr_id=5

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!



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.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Hi,
In my opinion, the rules of go should fulfill three conditions :

1-Novice people who read them should be able to play a game and score it without help of a more experienced player.

2-The rules of play should be translated and published by national federations worldwide, and referees should be able to use these translations and score games in any tournament without dispute.

3-The rules of go should be programmable, so that we can have software playing go.

And I would also add a wish of my own : there should be only one ruleset in the world, so that we don't have to worry under which rules we are playing.

Today, it is not possible to sell a set of stones and a board with the rules of play in game shops.
Nor is it possible for people interested to read the rules in Wikipedia and try by themselves.
At work, some colleagues told me that they have tried to play go by themselves, but gave up because they could not understand the rules.
And we can see from time to time novice people coming in this forum, asking why their software is claiming to have won a game while they think the opposite. For one people registering and asking questions here, how many just uninstall the app and try another game ?

If I look at official rulesets in the world, I can see that progressively, federations are giving up the Japanese rule and are adopting the AGA rule instead.
I think that an ideal ruleset should look like the AGA rule, but with the Chinese way of dealing with superkos : prevent the repetition of a position for cycles of two moves, and have the referee decide what to do for longer repetitions. And for softwares, prevent any positional repetition.

Emphasis mine. In the West we need rules that raw beginners can understand, because we do not have a developed weiqi community like they have in the East.



Quoting a recent exchange between Ed Lee and myself on This 'n' That:

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Sorry,

Is there a way to get the video for the full game or the SGF?

Thanks. Take care.

_________________
一碁一会

I don't think the full game video is on the internet. Only the short clips yoyoma uploaded are available now.

I uploaded the sgf file with the correct order in a previous message, and that should be enough to follow the game.

Unfortunately, non-Korean speakers will have trouble understanding what mistakes both players made at the end of the game. Simply speaking, Black threw away the game and White almost threw it back but managed to save it with the help of the rule allowing her not to make a reinforcement. (This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSo-zFNYyuk&t=1s explains many other possible moves, but only in Korean.)

_________________
Jaeup Kim
Professor in Physics, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, Korea
Author of the Book "Understanding the Rules of Baduk", available at https://home.unist.ac.kr/professor/jukim/bbs/board.php?bo_table=notice&wr_id=5

I know most people wish similar things, but they usually miss one important condition.

4. The rule should be free from anomalies.

Well.. what is anomaly? It is a subjective term which means one cannot define it rigorously.

However, it is a serious issue to make a rule acceptable for the professional players. I bet they will never accept a rule that a separated moonshine life ends up with a life or a rule allowing one to have a benefit from send-two-receive-one trick, even if such a thing happens rarely. They rather prefer a referee to come to the player and say "Hey, your claim is disgraceful, and there is no way for me to accept it. Give up the game now, or you will be in a serious trouble in your future career."

I guess it is one reason why the Eastern Asian rules are written in such an ambiguous way. They know the rule text is often contradictory, but they want to leave it as it is, and interpret the rule text the way they prefer. i.e. they are ready to abandon the literal meaning of the rule text if it is inevitable to prevent an abuser to try an anomalous game end.

I am not defending them here, but I am saying that it is really important to understand why they act so weirdly in their rule writing, if you want to make a ruleset acceptable for them.

_________________
Jaeup Kim
Professor in Physics, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, Korea
Author of the Book "Understanding the Rules of Baduk", available at https://home.unist.ac.kr/professor/jukim/bbs/board.php?bo_table=notice&wr_id=5

That's the one named "temp.sgf"? Sorry, I hadn't connected both.

Thanks anyhow. Take care.

[Edited to delete questions that were already answered; my apologies, I'd assumed the videos where from a different game witha similar issue; brain gasses]

_________________
一碁一会

Indeed. Is ending the game with an unfinished ko because of a ko ban anomalous or not? Shusai and Go Seigen thought not, but the Nihon Kiin 1949 rules forbade it. Is Three-Points-Without-Capturing anomalous? Berlekamp and Wolfe showed that theory supports that evaluation, but the Nihon Kiin 1989 rules do not allow it. Ing regarded as anomalous the fact that two double ko death positions can combine to produce a single superko, so that one position can live. (It is similar to Moonshine Life, where a double ko can be used as a ko threat to prevent capturing the group.) However, even before I developed the theory of multiple ko evaluation, I could show that there are positions that are not themselves double ko deaths that can break the double ko. From the standpoint of theory, it is the single double ko death that is exceptional.



This is the way most court systems work in the real world. Real legislation is often ambiguous and sometimes contradictory. Courts make rulings only as necessary, and the rulings themselves may not be logical.

The short history of written go rules shows that attempts to eliminate anomalies can introduce complications and ambiguities, and can even produce new and different anomalies down the road. Under the J89 rules it can be correct to leave a group with two eyes on the board with liberties as a new kind of seki. Anomaly or not? To try to avoid very rare but perceived anomalies Ing introduced Fighting Kos and Disturbing Kos, a distinction which he never managed to demonstrate logically. There are kos which could be either. Disturbing kos can be very disturbing.

OTOH, Ing's 4 pass rule, designed to prevent anomalies, is actually a very beautiful way to deal with end of game issues. However, most players do not understand it, regarding the 3d and 4th passes as mere formalities. Since the difficulties which the rule addresses occur infrequently, that lack of understanding is rarely a problem. Still, the rule itself has produced a rules dispute.

Now, I am an advocate of Button Go, and it has been used at least once in international competition, but not under that name. I doubt if the organizers had even heard of button go. With one simple alteration AGA rules can implement button go. But human beings are quite good at having rules or principles with exceptions. Despite being criticized as illogical, the Japanese 1949 rules were onto something. Instead of having difficult to understand and apply rules to prevent infrequent anomalies, have easy to understand and apply rules, with any known anomalies listed as exceptions. And if theorists come along later with rationales for the rulings on anomalies, so much the better.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Professional players in China seem to be ok with chinese rules.

Are there some examples of moonshine life, or send-2-receive-1 benefit, with positional superko ?



But this would prevent computers to play go, in contradiction with the third requirement.
I would prefer having strict rules, with some extremely rare oddities such as triple ko or molasses ko.

Triple ko doesn't bother me. With the positional or situational superko rule, it just behaves as a regular ko.
Molasses ko, on the other hand, is indeed a monster. Let computers play molasses ko until the end, and keep the chinese option : in real life, if needed, the referee may decide what happens is case of molasses ko.

According to the statistics in the Go Player's Almanach, triple and quadruple ko occurs in one game out of 10,000 (quadruple kos are as frequent as triple kos).
Molasses ko and Round-robin ko have never been reported in 100,000 games.



If I understand correctly, Button go uses area scoring. Which means that, in it's simplest form, it forces the players to count all the area. That will be difficult to swallow.



I don't understand : you mean that at the end, there won't be an equal number of black and white stones on the board ?
In this case, the AGA rule doesn't work. You can't have the score defined by area and fill territory with prisoners if the total number of black and white stones are not equal (except in handicap games).
Or am I missing something ?

This form of button go, with a token, uses area scoring. Which is one of the options of AGA rules.



Not necessarily.



Well, as the guy who introduced the idea of pass stones in the AGA journal in the 1970s, I know what I'm doing. (BTW, I was probably not the first person to come up with the idea of pass stones; I was not the only one, OC.) This method requires AGA territory scoring, not area scoring, which requires a token or other adjustment. But, IIUC, most players use territory scoring anyway, and the idea of requiring White to pass last has met with confusion and opposition.

Button go is a hybrid between area and territory rules. This is accomplished by requiring an equal number of pass stones or other stones played after the button instead of an equal number of stones on the board for scoring. Basically, before the button the game is played by territory rules, and afterwards, which is where nearly all anomalies and other difficulties arise, it is played by area rules, by which it is normally easy to resolve life and death and kos. This has little effect on strategy, because, with few exceptions, correct play by this form of territory scoring is also correct by area scoring. Button go is not area go by another name, nor is it a form of territory go, but a combination of both.

Edit: Using area counting with the ½ point token has the effect of using territory rules before the button because it means that who plays the last dame does not matter, as a rule.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Yes, I agree. The first thumb rule I learned from my rule research was this: "Every rule has anomalies".
The second thumb rule is "If you add one sentence in the rule to eliminate one anomaly, it almost certainly creates a new anomaly.


I am a supporter of the pass stone and button go, or any other variants sharing the same philosophy. I often see pros and amateurs saying that "The Chinese rule itself is OK, but I just can't bear 7.5 komi. Unfortunately, 6.5 komi is unacceptable." They are not true rule beginners (The true beginner will simply insist applying 6.5, not knowing its problem.), but I am so surprised that none of them really know that a simple modification enables the introduction of 6.5 komi. (and the players in the Chinese tournament do not need to wait for the referee to do the counting.)


When writing my book, I always had trouble identifying who did something first. I will at least add one sentence mentioning that you suggested the introduction of the pass stone in the AGA rule.

Regarding this issue, old Chinese records with group tax are interesting. It seems that they force White to make the last move, which suggests that their scoring method might have been close to the current AGA territory scoring. (Of course, minus the group tax.) A clever person may have developed the idea of pass stone from that experience, because filling in your territory is practically the same thing as giving a prisoner to your opponent, especially for the last move of the game. Of course, I don't have any more clues on it.

_________________
Jaeup Kim
Professor in Physics, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, Korea
Author of the Book "Understanding the Rules of Baduk", available at https://home.unist.ac.kr/professor/jukim/bbs/board.php?bo_table=notice&wr_id=5

This is one well-known situation. For all three types of superko rules, Black fails to protect the upper group. When I demonstrated it in front of 40 pros, they simply laughed. In their mind, "PSK prohibits Black to play at X" is an unacceptable flaw of the rule.

Why are Chinese players fine with the current rule? As I mentioned, they are ready to ignore the written text of the rule. Here is a sarcastic summary of the Chinese rule. If a whole board repetition(WBR) occurs
1) sometimes the game ends with a draw
2) sometimes the player who made WBR gets the penalty
3) sometimes the opponent gets the penalty (or at least the game continues)

Black 10 at X makes a clear WBR, but they know Black should not be penalized. Thus, a human referee will come up to choose 3. Is there a clear algorithm distinguishing cases 1, 2 and 3? The answer is No.


Considering how many draws Lee Sedol has made in his career, it definitely depends on one's strength. (and of course on one's play style) Players who know how to make a draw (and not to lose a game) tend to make it more often.

_________________
Jaeup Kim
Professor in Physics, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, Korea
Author of the Book "Understanding the Rules of Baduk", available at https://home.unist.ac.kr/professor/jukim/bbs/board.php?bo_table=notice&wr_id=5

Then let me be clear. I wrote a very short article explaining the current Taiwan (Ing) rules, which had a superko rule. At the end I suggested that people who wanted to try out those rules, but were used to Japanese rules, could use pass stones (which I called bookkeeping stones) with White passing last, so that they could count territory as they usually did. It was only much later that the AGA rules were formulated and used pass stones. AGA president Terry Benson was the editor of the AGA Journal when they printed my article (summer 1977, IIRC). I have not asked him, but he may have suggested the use of pass stones when they were formulating the rules. But, as I said, other people have certainly come up with the idea, so the AGA could have gotten the idea from several sources.



I disagree with Chen Zuyuan on that point. John Fairbairn published a translation of some of Chen's writings on the history of weiqi, which was available in GoGoD. (I don't know if it still is.) The oldest known description of weiqi is unclear. It talks about putting stones on the board with "two overflowing" or "both overflowing". That strongly suggests a form of stone scoring, and to some suggests a group tax. (I disagree. If you don't already know about the group tax, how do you get the idea from that phrase?) However, the oldest known scored games (centuries later) have scores for each player that are not only smaller than scores by any form of stone scoring, they are smaller than modern territory scoring by the amount of the group tax. (Again, if you didn't already know about the group tax that fact would be puzzling.) The few scored game records we have also indicate that each player made the same number of plays. But you cannot derive pass stones from that fact, because all of the games end with dame unfilled. Edit: In addition, you have to come up with the idea of keeping captured stones and using them to fill in territory for counting. Edit2: Removed further speculation.

Chen believes that territory scoring with a group tax derived from stone scoring with a group tax, via the use of pass stones. I see no evidence of that. In addition, I knew, long before hearing about ancient Chinese territory scoring, that no pass baduk produces territory scoring with a group tax. That is true for simple no pass baduk and also for no pass baduk with prisoner return, a form proposed by the late Professor Berlekamp. In fact, in Mathematical Go, Berlekamp proposes a special encore to allow the eyes necessary for life to be filled, which eliminates the group tax. A simple example of territory scoring with a group tax is the Capture Game, with a no pass rule. Once all the dame are filled, the players have to start filling in their territory, and have to leave the points necessary for life unfilled. Instead of filling in territory, they could stop play by agreement and determine the winner by counting territory with a group tax.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Emphasis mine.

Well, Ing rules treat this Sending-Two-Returning-One sequence as a disturbing ko, and prohibit White from repeating it. Ing does not use a superko rule by that name, OC. Spight rules (version 1) do allow the use of a superko rule. However, passes lift ko and superko bans. So under those rules after Black passes, lifting the superko ban. We start from the current position, with no ban on previous positions. Then, with a positional superko rule, White can play ("sending two"), can capture the two stones, but then ("returning one") would reproduce the position after the Black pass, which a positional superko rule would prohibit. A situational superko rule would allow it, but then Black could pass again, ending play by passing twice in the same whole board position. Kee rules also take care of such sequences. ( https://senseis.xmp.net/?KeeRulesOfGo ).

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.