It’s not whether white can stay alive. It’s whether white wants to stay alive, or whether it’s better to trade via a “mutual damage” sequence (I ignore your sente, you ignore mine) or via a ko fight. KataGo will often tell us that “obviously alive” stones are actually partly dead, because maybe you have better things to do than defending them in gote.
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You are right, white can live without fail, and I am also somewhat curious now. I can only add, that an ownership estimation of -0.6 may not correspond to estimated survival probability of 60% (maybe, not sure).
If -1 means 100% chance that white owns this point, and +1 means 100% chance that black owns this point, then I’m thinking -0.6 corresponds to 80% chance of survival, because -0.6 is “at the 20% mark” of the interval [-1, +1].
(in terms of an equation: -0.6 = -1 * 0.8 + 1 * 0.2, i.e. the mean of possible outcomes weighted by estimated probability)
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Is OGS’s scoring system really to blame here? I recognize that OGS has given points in an open border, which purists will dislike. However OP seems to be asking why one of the black groups were not marked as dead.
I think this one belongs in the thread “A compendium of Go’s terrible scoring system confusing beginners”
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Disagree: OGS makes scoring harder than Go’s rule do, because it adds inconsistency and incorrect behaviour: you are allowed to mark groups as dead against humans, but not against bots. Sometimes the AI will mark your groups dead for you as you wished, sometimes it won’t. It doesn’t follow the rule of contiguous regions being either white territory, black territory, or dame, but assigns different points within differently. If instead the rules of Go are followed and players always had to mark dead groups as dead and come to agreement they would sooner learn how to score and not be confused.
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OGS also implements scoring rules for go, which are also rules of go, as much as any other rulesets. Perhaps they should be named as such (or perhaps that would be even more confusing) but you should imagine “OGS” on front of any ruleset name, when playing on OGS. And OGS rules include “and then we ask katago what it thinks” in the rules.
I still think it counts, in that this type of results is inevitably confusing and does not allow a beginner to figure out the logic behind the rules.
I don’t think “Go scoring system” is at fault here, since Go scoring system was not applied.
There is no one go scoring system, there are many different scoring procedures and many implementations thereof. The OGS scoring system is definitely one of “go” scoring systems.
I don’t think it counts as a defined system since we don’t know how it works!
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I don’t know how Japanese scoring works really, we just had a thread of 50 posts arguing how seki and dame work or are supposed to work.
I agree that “katago does it” is ambiguous and not a satisfying definition. It’s not traditional go rules but it seems wrong to say it’s “not go rules” period.
It works like that:
if you end game according to real Go rules, your game is counted according to real Go rules.
If you pass too early, then Kata is the judge. If you don’t wish to deal with Kata, just don’t pass too early.
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Not always:
Nobody has an explanation for why it’s doing that, or if it is even still doing that (maybe it got fixed this week) so I think it’s not at all reasonable to call this a “scoring system” on par with Japanese or Chinese rules.
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in games vs human you can fix the score and it would be correct if borders are closed.
In games vs bots there are problems, but its possible to place unnecessary stones everywhere on your territory and only then pass, rules are Chinese.
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But I think its bad idea that scoring uses AI instead of simple filling algorithm.
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FWIW there’s an overhaul in the works:
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now we will have red squares, green squares and purple squares
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locations that need sealing before proper scoring can be done
I’m very curious about what this means! I’ve always thought that any position could be scored. Will we have unscorable positions where players will be forced to resume?
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That’s a weird statement. “Passing too early” is not an actual notion, players are entitled to pass whenever they want. Leaving a border open is a mistake, but it’s not against “real Go rules” (most rules at least).
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A compendium of OGS’s terrible scoring system confusing beginners
It’s certainly confusing for beginners that Go games can be scored before they are ready to be properly scored.
Properly scored (stone_defender’s words) is a practical concept - just because it isn’t in the rules doesn’t mean it’s not a useful concept.
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