Are “sente” and “gote” illusory concepts?
I don’t mean to say that these concepts are not helpful, nor that one cannot usefully distinguish between the two. Rather, I’m asking if whether these concepts are really just complicated emergent phenomenon that ultimately cannot be clearly defined for all situations.
So, I think one way “sente move” might be defined is to say that it is a move that “requires” a “local response”, whereas a “gote move” does not “require” a “local response” and the other player is “free” to “play elsewhere”. However, to grasp this definition one must then understand concepts like “requires”, “local response”, etc.
For example, suppose black puts a white stone in a ladder (which “works” since it would project across the board into empty space and eventually run into an edge unimpeded). If white then plays a stone across the board as a ladder breaker, is white really “playing elsewhere” or is that a form of “local response” since it is directly affecting that ladder?
Further, is a player really ever “free” to play wherever they like? Even in a situation where one player would appear to “have sente”, there might be only one (or very few) theoretically optimal moves (in the sense that they would not degrade the position to “lose any points” against a perfect opponent).
Of course, in the middle of the game or earlier, it’s impossible for us mere mortals to consider what the theoretically best options may be. But, in the endgame, rigorous evaluation of positions may start to become tractable, and one may even be able to determine the optimal line of play. Thus, perhaps we may be able firmly grasp what “sente” and “gote” means in some tractable endgame situations …
However, considering endgame theory raises even more hairy issues, like making sense of additional concepts like “double sente”, “reverse sente”, “double gote”, etc. Understanding these are further complicated by the existence of odd situations like mutual damage. Then, one might learn that the traditional basic endgame theory is considered obsolete and superseded by modern endgame theory, in which something called miai counting is considered to be superior to the older deiri counting of the traditional endgame theory, since the deiri counting may lead to incorrect play in some situations. It turns out that even concepts like “double sente”, “reverse sente”, etc. may just be obsolete heuristics that do not fully capture the complexity of the endgame. But wait, the miai counting system requires fractional values to quantify move/positions? And then, a couple of clever mathematicians applied combinatorial game theory (CGT) to develop late endgame theory that shows that real numbers alone are not enough! By the way, they definitively demonstrated the power of their theory by systematically constructing an endgame problem that would stump 9-dan pros, but that they could systematically solve with their unique mathematical theory. However, as one goes down the CGT rabbit hole, one finds that we need to have concepts like “star *”, “up ↑”, “down ↓”, “tinies” and “minies”, and their various combinations like ↑↑* (double up star) to quantify various increasingly-convoluted-positions.
NOTE: I don’t really understand any of those Sensei’s Library articles that I name drop in the previous paragraph. I’m not trying to be pedantic, and I’m stating that I don’t understand these topics. My point is just to say that I only know enough about “sente”/“gote” to begin to realize that how much vastly beyond my understanding these concepts seem to actually be.
Okay, let’s come back to a more basic question, are all moves either “sente” or “gote”? Or, does a third possibility exist?
It seems that the theory allows for a third possibility (although I don’t fully understand it):