get more is pretty intuitive to me. But not like an arrangement of this rule (which I could call it the suffocation rule), simply like in the Chinese rule.
YES! Whenever I try to teach friends or family this is the rule they all get stuck on.
The game was Japanese rules so a7 shouldnât have been a point. No points in seki.
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Rule set without any special cases additional rules is good, but humans have to be able to estimate score without machine.
Chinese rule set is as close as possible to that idea.
while Japanese rules just ignores seki, it doesnât matter why stones are alive in Chinese.
(group doesnât need to be able to have 2 eyes. Any stone that opponent has no idea how to capture counts in the final score.
Game can be continued until there is no disagreement. While in Japanese territory reduces when you play inside your territory, so proof is problematic, you canât do it in actual game, but in Chinese you lose nothing if you do so)
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This rule also has to be explained a bit more too, since a capturing move can at times leave ones own stone/group with no liberties as well as the opponents, and as is it sounds like both/all groups get taken off the board.
I think itâs tricky to come up with a formulation of the rules that captures all the subtleties of the game but is extremely easy to state and is intuitive.
Eg even with the Tromp Taylor ones linked by yebellz one does have to flesh it out a bit to understand the counting phase
but also I donât think the terminology of âcoloringâ the grid and âreaching a colorâ or âreaching emptyâ would be intuitive for most people.
It would be nice to edit the OPâs rules a bit and find a nice terminology for simply explaining the game and rules.
Some comments
- I once explained the rules to someone and they found saying âplaying at the corners of the squaresâ more intuitive than calling them âintersectionsâ (it doesnât really matter if theyâre not literal squares).
- Taking stones off the board in a particular order and the concepts of liberties and that connected stones share liberties kind of needs to be explicitly stated somehow. I donât know an intuitive way to write that, and while the Tromp Taylor rules avoid liberties explicitly by talking about clearing a color etc I donât think itâd be very intuitive for someone whoâs never played before.
- I think just saying a board position can never repeat simplifies the having to define a ko rule explicitly, although I find it can make you wonder how positions can repeat themselves, and potentially worry that you wonât be able to recognise illegal moves etc.
- If actually going to scoring (not this No Pass Go type thing) area scoring does seem simpler if less convenient since thereâs possibly more stones/points to count. Possibly explicitly defining something like the Tromp Taylor rules do on scoring is worth doing if one wants points in seki etc even without explicitly saying it.
- A playerâs score is the number of points of her color, plus the number of empty points that reach only her color.
- One should probably have a rule about removing dead stones which are agreed upon to speed up the end of the game as yebellz mentioned in modifying the Tromp Taylor rules.
and we should probably be playing inside the squares
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I donât think having more rule sets is elegant. I canât imagine an improvement to the existing options that would justify adding to the already existing confusion around multiple rulesets (distinct from variants).
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Iâd be happy to have a simplified explanation of Chinese rules where you felt like you understood exactly how to play the game, what moves where legal/illegal and how to count at the end, and if you were confused at any point you could just look at the steps again and it would be clear.
I mean The Chinese Rules of Go is fine but itâs a bit long.
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Thatâs basically NZD Rules.
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I agree that the Tromp Taylor rules are not very intuitive nor accessible for new players. These rules are maybe more of a linguistics experiment to see how concise one could express an area-scoring ruleset, while defining as few concepts as possible, rather than a practical ruleset for introducing beginners. A key feature is that they avoid directly defining the concept of territory or liberty, and instead use the concept of reaching as a combined way to effectively realize both. This is kind of neat from a logical point of view (for people that already understand the rules), but not great for beginners, since distinguishing between and defining the concepts of liberty and territory is helpful for understanding the game.
I feel like the New Zealand rules are essentially a simplified version of the Chinese rules. A significant change is that the NZ rules simply employ a superko rule, whereas the Chinese rules still have some inelegance of certain cyclic positions (like triple ko, or eternal life) causing a no result, while other types of cycles (like sending two, returning one) are forbidden due to superko, and moonshine life is considered dead (even though it would appear like a triple ko) since the superko rule does apply in that case.
Itâs much simpler that New Zealand rules just apply superko in all situations (which eliminates no results as well). However, two other differences with NZ rules is that suicide is allowed and komi is suggested to be an integer. These sometimes offend some traditionalist views.
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âChineseâ rules on OGS simply employ a superko rule too, there is no
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Yeah, itâs a bit weird what should actually happen in the Chinese rules under long cycles. The simplest thing to do is to simply apply superko and forbid all long cycles and eliminate the possibility of no results. Iâm glad to see that is simply what is done on OGS. However, itâs debatable whether that truly captures the proper Chinese rules.
The official Chinese rules do in fact discuss that certain long cycles could result in a draw or replay (no result). In practice, in professional tournaments even, this possibility of no result is often kept.
In rare situations such as triple ko, quadruple ko, eternal life, and round-robin ko, if neither side will yield, the referee may declare a draw or a replay. See Diagrams 4 to 7. {This is a clear conflict with Section 6, forbidding the reappearance of the same board position. --wjh}
The part in brackets is a parenthetical remark from the transcriber that set up the website here: The Chinese Rules of Go
Here is a neat tool for objectively understanding and comparing various rulesets:
https://lightvector.github.io/KataGo/rules.html
This was created by the author of the KataGo bot, and is what that bot uses as the definition of various rules.
Note that you can manually check and uncheck boxes to generate a custom rule set, or you can use one of the shortcut buttons (marked with âChinese-likeâ, âJapanese-likeâ, etc.) to get something that closely emulates one of the familiar rule sets.
Yeah I think a recent (2020) game was supposed to have been voided in the Chinese A league with a quadruple ko in it.
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I just happened to check the KataGo rules website again today (since itâs such a handy reference), and I found that it had been updated to now include an âOGS/KGS Chinese-like Rulesâ button.
Maybe @hexahedron noticed this discussion?
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Just say lines instead of liberties. Much easier for new players.
Sure there is the case where two lines point to the same liberty, but it doesnât effect the game.
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Or âwhiskersâ
Instead of âlife or deathâ, it becomes âsaved or shavedâ
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Or âsnorkelsâ: the lines extending out from a stone are like little tubes that provide air to breathe.
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