Let’s see how we could resolve this problem, since as a moderator having to fix a lot of wrongly scored games I would really love to have a better auto-score at the end of the game without giving away the position to the players (which is only going to give us more reports about “opponent resumed the game after learning what to play from the scoring stage”).
In the situation above, we assume the two players both passed and consider the one White stone to be dead. KataGo, however, considers the Black stones to be dead if White is to move, and the White stone to be dead if Black is to move. This territory should therefore be easy to spot automatically: if certain intersections swap sides depending on whether Black or White has the next move, they are unsettled.
Now, to whom should KataGo grant the unsettled area? I think we could solve the majority of these problems by making two distinctions:
- There’s the “open border”, where it’s possible from an unsettled empty intersection to reach settled stones of both players. Such areas should be marked as dame, and the game should in theory not be scored and be resumed before concluding.
- There’s the “killable group”, where a group needs an extra move to avoid being killed. In such a case, the stones of the “dead” group usually outnumber the stones of the “killer” group. This is the kind of position we have at the top: 4 black stones are threatened by 1 white stone. In such a case, I suggest that KataGo flags such an area as belonging to the colour with the most stones inside the unsettled area.