I don't really understand what issues one can have with the KGS Japanese ruleset. It's not the (certainly bizarre and overcomplicated) official Japanese ruleset. It's just a very simple territory scoring ruleset with life and death status determined by agreement. It's simple and practical and doesn't require filling dame.
At the risk of looking like a troll, I ask,
a) What's the ko rule? b) Could one ever play in the opponent's territory and force the opponent to lose points simply because the dead stone would live unless it was attacked?
I don't really understand what issues one can have with the KGS Japanese ruleset. It's not the (certainly bizarre and overcomplicated) official Japanese ruleset. It's just a very simple territory scoring ruleset with life and death status determined by agreement. It's simple and practical and doesn't require filling dame.
At the risk of looking like a troll, I ask,
a) What's the ko rule? b) Could one ever play in the opponent's territory and force the opponent to lose points simply because the dead stone would live unless it was attacked?
a) The ko rule(beyond the basic rule) for KGS-Japanese is simply that the game is considered invalid/unplayed if a given position repeats 3 times. b) playing in the opponents territory gives him a prisoner, and forces him to put a stone in his territory. These cancel out in the score.
The problem with this ruleset it rather that you need to agree with your opponent on the status of groups, and that sometimes(very very rare) strange situations occur.
Mr. Mormon wrote:b) Could one ever play in the opponent's territory and force the opponent to lose points simply because the dead stone would live unless it was attacked?
b) playing in the opponents territory gives him a prisoner, and forces him to put a stone in his territory. These cancel out in the score.
a) The ko rule(beyond the basic rule) for KGS-Japanese is simply that the game is considered invalid/unplayed if a given position repeats 3 times.
Why 3 instead of 1? More importantly, why invalidate a game instead of avoid a position/situation? Surely finishing a game is more fun than waiting for the next challenger?
a) The ko rule(beyond the basic rule) for KGS-Japanese is simply that the game is considered invalid/unplayed if a given position repeats 3 times.
Why 3 instead of 1? More importantly, why invalidate a game instead of avoid a position/situation? Surely finishing a game is more fun than waiting for the next challenger?
Because to avoid such repetition, one of the players has to be willing to break out of the cycle. Once you hit the third repeated board, it's a statement by both players that neither are willing to play an alternate move. Without a superko rule you can't force the players out of the cycle, so either the game never ends or its voided.
Since KGS-Japanese rules try to imitate Japanese rules it's natural that they don't use super-ko but void the game if endless repetition occurs.
And since those games are quite uncommon (SL says 1:9000 game for professionals) how they are handled doesn't matter much in practice, as long as the rules are consistent. It can be annoying in tournaments since a rematch needs to be fit into the schedule, but for normal games it doesn't matter.
Personally I only had a single game where this occured. And only because I was too lazy to count. I was ahead by more than the value of the triple-ko, so I would likely have won even with surrendering the ko.
People disagree on whether super-ko or voiding the game is muddier.
From what I remember from some rules threads super-ko isn't popular with Chinese pros and even so their rules contain super-ko the game still are judged void quite often.
