A compendium of OGS's terrible scoring system confusing beginners

[Vsotvep]

@Uberdude

Such algorithms aren’t perfect, but work better than the too-clever-for-its-own-good AI on OGS and then the scoring tool should allow players to manually mark dead stones / territories to correct it.

We had a different scoring algorithm before that was not based on AI, and my experience is that we got a similar number of reports of incorrectly scored games, if not more. At least the current problems with scoring make sense to me, while the previous problems were just very random or weird. The main issue back then was seki being marked as dead, or dead stones being marked as alive. It’s very hard to write an algorithm that can decide life & death or seki without playouts.

Since the AI algorithm launched, the moderator team has been keeping track of incorrectly scored games in an internal thread, and I believe to have found an improvement to the current algorithm that solves 95% of the current mistakes it makes (which are mostly about territory with open borders or KataGo reading out L / D beyond the players’ abilities), but that’s not implemented (yet).

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@gennan

And if there is a black group inside, all intersections connecting to both black and white should be marked as neutral, unless the black group is marked dead (agreed by both players).

This is currently how the score can be marked by two players, but this has problems with a lot of beginners who try to score games with open territory (and don’t see the problem, thus don’t resume the game).

The AI scoring only kicks in when one of the two players requests it, when one of the players keeps refusing the score, or when a player is playing against a bot.

@bugcat

If one’s spent 30, 60, or 90 minutes playing the game then surely thirty seconds can be afforded to the scoring.

You’d be surprised how common it is that people leave immediately after passing.