A compendium of OGS's terrible scoring system confusing beginners

Simple surrounded from all sides by one color areas should be painted by using simple flood-fill algorithm. AI should be used for other areas only.

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Nope, because of seki, or dead groups with only one eye.

Really, making a good algorithm is not at all easy.

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then limit it to at least 2 empty points

Then a group with false eyes might become alive.

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The explanation from the OGS team is convincing imo. Unfortunately the thread will be used to proof that OGS’s scoring is defective somehow compared to other servers.

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well, I suggested how to improve already existing algorithm:

OK, this works for the above example, but will it work in general for most games?

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AI already works good enough generally, but it often paints a lot of territory as blue. I suggesting how to paint blue territory. I talking only about fixing this problem, not all problems.

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Need more if’s.

Imgur

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I think that all “unsettled stones” examples are not a problem, as long as both players agree on the status of stones. There is a defect, but neither player noticed, so leave it at that. Don’t confuse novices even more with a superhuman AI detecting positional weaknesses that both players missed.

I think the only real problem is a final position with unclosed borders. I think OGS’ should not make attempts to “fix” such a player blunder. Living with the consequences of ones mistakes is a valuable lesson.

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As for the scoring of the position in the original post: why was it scored by AI estimation? Did the bot and the human player disagree on the status of any stones?

Exactly: currently the AI marks such weaknesses as if the players both are aware that the weakness can be exploited. My fix was a proposal to make sure the AI wouldn’t force-feed its superhuman reading unto unsuspecting players.

The problem is usually not with human players, but with games against bots, where the bot passed because it’s an idiot ddk bot, and the human passed because they didn’t spot the hole. In human-human games, the player could dispute the impossibility of scoring the open territory by resuming the game and closing it, but against bots the game is automatically scored, and the open territory just gets marked as dame completely. This doesn’t seem fair to me.

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Then I would argue that humans should be extra careful to close borders against bots, because resuming is not supported against bots.

About using AI to settle scoring disputes: I think the AI should only be used to judge the status of stones that have a disputed status. And use floodfills from there.
The AI should not be used to estimate the whole board score of a final position under assumption of continued play. That just violates how games have been scored for ages.

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For comparison, DGS uses the simplest algorithm mentioned above, i.e. all stones are alive by default, obvious territory is attributed, uncertainties due to dead stones are marked as dame by default, players have to mark dead stones and agree or continue play. For DGS bot games, simple situations (i.e. no dead stones) are accepted, anything more complicated defers to the bot admin for human input. This system works in practice including a GunGo bot with a huge number of games (10^4 or even 10^5 - I can’t remember exactly). Keep it simple!

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Scoring is part of Go. OGS is trying to completely remove it.

There should be simple system by default, where status of at least one group is blue. And it should be impossible to accept such score. So players will be aware that they need to click something on the board, not just hit “accept” and leave.

You can also add big “Use score suggested by AI” button, which activates if both players click it. No need to fix AI, let players do that themselves, just add text under button that AI may has bugs.

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Something still has to be done about scoring games of human vs ai, since people can play ranked games vs bots, whereby if allowed to do whatever they want in scoring can tweak it so they win/lose and adjust rank however they wish. The bots probably can’t dispute life/death/scoring so needs to be done automatically but which is also the problem of the OP.

All these various suggestions to eliminate the autoscore and force players to score the board themselves run into a problem that may be little known. Large numbers of beginners, probably well more than half, don’t know how to mark the board, let alone score it. And they don’t even know what they don’t know. This is because they haven’t read the documentation. This problem extends even into the ranks of real SDKs (as distinct from the new provisional players). A few SDKs get score cheated and don’t know how it happened. One even reported it as a computer hacking event.

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It’s simple, we ban the bots and kyus.

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I think this problem is better addressed by some interactive help that activates in game for new accounts. A dialog pops up “Both players have now passed and it’s time to score the game. The empty areas of the board need to be marked as black territory, white territory, or neutral, and the groups of stones as either alive or dead. The system has suggested these to help you but can sometimes get it wrong, so please check you agree, you can toggle their status by clicking on them. Then click the Done button. If you want to see the full scoring tutorial please click here, it includes a video walkthrough”.

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