A silly question: What's the highest obtainable score in a game of Go?

[claire_yang]

I can help with the history of rules change, most of my sources will be in Chinese (and some in Japanese) though, there are lots of discussion about ancient rules and how they evolve.

The best we can guess is some time before Tang Dynasty and presumably much earlier (maybe in Han dynasty), the 兩溢 rule is the basis predates stone scoring. And some believe they didn’t compare stones on the board but compare captures (under the rule where there is no pass but handing prisoner if a player “pass”), play until there are no place to play (suicide allow, but that would be handing prisoners to the opponent), and a logical origin of why there is an ancient custom of putting a handful of stones on the board to represent resign, since originally they seem to use some kind of tally by 3 system to count prisoners.

The oldest known surviving first hand Go book - Dunhuang Go Manual

Dunhuang Go Manual (敦煌碁經, or as the name written on the scroll 碁經 The Classic of Go) is the oldest known surviving first hand Go book existed (unlike other sources although probably older but mostly second-hand or more, and most don’t have enough details but only a few sentences). I’ve been able to find the full-size digitized image from the International Dunhuang Project database IDP Or.8210/S.5574 Recto

Summary

<a class="lightbox" href="//ogs-forums.s3.dualstack.us-east-1.ama…

And my speculation for even earlier precursor

A hypothetical precursor game rules of ancient Go

I’ve read in the book The Evolution of rules in Go, hypothesis that Go originated as a type of AtariGo, and where a group only required one eye to be alive. But I still feel those are still more rules than necessary. Hence, I’d like to propose a simpler ruleset that required very few assumptions and priors, even without rules regarding territory, but still looks like it would naturally evolve to Go as we know it today. #1. Each side places a stone on the intersection of the board. One after an…

Later on, in Tang and Song Dynasty records, we are very certain they used a group tax territory scoring that is not stone scoring called 數路法 (count by “road”). The results are reported as how many 路 on each side. This was likely a simplification for 兩溢, so they don’t have to play to the end to count everything. This rule is the one that got exported to Japan, where they later on loss the group tax rule and only keep the now “territory rule”. It’s a branch out of the ancient rule.

Back in China they went for a different route, where they keep the stone scoring spirit, so only one side needs to count, and keep the group tax rule up til 19th century, even early 20th century. The spirit is that since gambling games were what keep the game going for centuries when dynasties collapsed and rose again and again, a system where hidden capture stones can be resolved was needed - simply don’t count them, and only count those on the board. This evolved to area scoring, where they also later remove the group tax rule.

And in the mid to later 20th century, the full set of defined Ing’s rule is proposed to resolved more complicated situation in ko and how to handle time pressure based on area scoring.