Just so no one misunderstands, using the OGS Joseki dictionary in live games is prohibited.
8 Likes
Cheating: I will just restrain the meaning to the fact that you use advices from others or programs while playing your game; In an extreme case even if both players agree you may think it’s no more cheating (although OGS TOS is still against when using AI).
Analysing tool: In that sense is not cheating. You get a visual help but not suggestions. Because of the new go material offered by the computers, I even can understand that a game is no more the same as with a shared physical board and offer new possibilities to explore without annoying the other player.
SE: We could feel the same if the score was just a matter of counting defined territories, but that’s not true. An estimator will check sequences/stones position to reach an estimation. Even if you are satisfied by only getting the estimation, others can access more information like closing boundaries, possibility of a reduction or invasion, life and death status… The low quality of the SE we have yet minimize this but doesn’t completely avoid the facts. Even, with a better SE, a more precise estimate as your own is in itself already a bias.
What I never said:
SE users are cheaters.
I’m just pointing out how SE is well integrated and can be use without restrictions and that is enough serious matter that it delay OGS to get a better one.
Beyond that the meaning of cheating may be restricted (agreement to use AI between players) or extended (no use at all for any tool) according to each one taste, but it’s hard to satisfy everyone especially when they are so opposite sides.
2 Likes
I cheat by hovering my mouse over the board, this creates a shadowstone that helps me visualise how the board would look if i played there. If using SE counts as cheating, so does shadowstones as well.
9 Likes
The Score Estimator is certainly a useful tool in Endgame, but not THAT useful. You still need to find the correct sequence to make the score shown happen. (Also sometimes it’s outright too stupid to count correctly.)
But I’d always supportive of having a finer control over all possible “cheats”, including the Shadow Stone <3 KoBa <3 mentioned…
Would be nice to be able to turn them off one by one.
Would be even nicer, if they were turned off completly in ladders 
5 Likes
Some thoughts from a 15 kyu player:
The score estimator is pretty bad. It sometimes marks obviously dead stones as alive. Since my counting skills are still lacking, I do use it to roughly figure out whether I am ahead, behind or equal in a late middlegame. For that, I have to use analysis to fill every gap and thus mark territory as mine or my opponent’s.
If there are ways to abuse the score estimator, deal with those ways (such as not allowing it to be used together with certain other features), not the score estimator itself, which despite its flaws, remains useful for weaker players.
Weaker players may also suffer from not understanding its flaws. In a recent game, (https://online-go.com/game/25514816), the counting estimator gave me zero territory at the top and I had to manually mark the five black stones at the top as dead. There was another game where I was losing but the counting estimator marked my large dead group as alive, giving me a win, and my opponent accepted the estimate, but out of fairness, I fixed it and took the loss. Even worse are counting estimator mistakes that I am unable to correct (see https://forums.online-go.com/t/scoring-bug-area-cannot-be-marked-as-territory for details).
8 Likes
I am not sure for OGS but the score estimator shouldn’t be the same tool as the score calculator used at the end of the games. It’s no more a estimation but a precise counting of each score, which should need less intelligence as an estimator in some way.
Now I see that even if the estimator is not very good working, it is still used to get, with correction, information that a player has difficulty to get by himself. That would give an advantage between someone using it and someone else not using it at the same level (which is the reason why AI are excluded).
3 Likes
I don’t give a @#$%&! if my opponent is playing with SE or has a separate window open with an AI go editor helping them as I have explained on other countless threads that discuss so-called cheating in go…
5 Likes
I use the estimator sometimes in correspondence games and once had Goule’s suspicion that I had gained an unintended advantage by seeing its judgement of what is and isn’t territory. I’ve since decided that its judgement in that area is so clueless that I can use it just as a shortcut to my own territory count.
In live games I only use the score estimator to decide if I ought to resign. At that point I’m not in the mood to spend a minute or so counting territory. A “Should I resign now?” button would be just as good (“Yes, seriously, like twenty moves ago”/“That must be your decision”).
One useful improvement to the score estimator would be to teach it the difference between Chinese and Japanese scoring. You sometimes get players pointlessly filling dame under the impression that they’re improving their score.
2 Likes
The score estimator is separate from the autoscore used at the end. Most obviously, the SE uses Chinese rules regardless of the game rules. The autoscore is generally more accurate, but a recent bug sometimes causes it to fail to mark territory.
7 Likes
I am surprised so many people are disagreeing with Goule.
SE is external help because it provides information about the game state/history not actually found in the game state/history. Analysis board is not external help because it provides only information obtained from either the game state/history, or your own mind. The OGS TOS definitions of “external help” or “AI” or “cheating” are immaterial to this discussion because the discussion concerns what the OGS TOS should allow. Getting external help regarding an ongoing game of go is cheating.
(joseki dictionaries in correspondence are an edge case which I am fine with unrestrictedly allowing (as it is now), because to ban them would imply that no player with ongoing correspondence games could consult any joseki dictionary branches showing joseki occurring in any of those ongoing games until the relevant games were over (because even in midgame, there may be common follow-ups listed in the joseki dictionary), which is clearly a cure far worse than the ill)
I affirm the following:
- Using SE is using external help and is cheating, although a mild form.
- Using the Analysis Board is not cheating unless the players agree not to use it, though it may have a negative impact on your ability to read things out yourself.
- Using a joseki dictionary during a game is cheating, but we should (and do) allow it in correspondence games because to disallow it there would have far worse consequences.
3 Likes
Given that SE is disabled when analysis is disabled for a game, I find these assertions to be contradictory.
1 Like
What does OGS implementation have to do with the line between fair play and cheating? It is the opponents to Goule’s position who are inserting irrelevant appeals to authority.
1 Like
Samraku, because it’s allowed in our community (and on other servers too) it’s not cheating by definition. You can argue that it should be considered cheating but you can’t argue that it is cheating.
For example, in a marathon using external help like a car or a bike is cheating because community agrees that it is. But using expensive running shoes that give you advantage isn’t cheating because community agrees that it’s not.
Something being an “external help” doesn’t automatically mean it’s cheating. What could make it cheating is community agreeing that it is. But I don’t think anyone is seriously considering SE cheating. Like, imagine someone calling some twitch streamer cheater because they use score estimator. Doesn’t happen. No one gives a crap. On the other hand if that streamer would just pull us Lizzie in the middle of the game, they would definitely got called out. And this is what settles it.
And if you want to argue that SE is cheating then analysis is def cheating, it gives you much bigger advantage because people can’t read that deep.
4 Likes
Sometimes, even community standards are themselves a cheat, as in the case of the last-minute banning of Bob Seagren’s pole.
2 Likes
Against bots especially as you can’t change the score.
1 Like
Stones not even placed on the board yet is definitely information not obtained from the board OR your mind. It does what your mind can’t which is to read that many moves in.
If we’re calling people cheaters so easily, people who use analysis are cheaters*. You don’t want it to be called cheating, because analysis is oh so sparkly and variations so fun. But it’s info not on the board and something you can’t do in your mind, so according to you the definition of cheating.
Fwiw, score is ON the board, the estimate is based on what is on the board at a given moment. If both opponents count, they should reach the same conclusion, 100% perfect information situation.
And joseki is basically someone did the analysis beforehand and you get the branch out of the box.
*for the sake of the argument.
Such an elitist perspective, “what a strong player can do easily is cheating, what even strong players mostly can’t is not”.
3 Likes
I’m with @Gia in this discussion. The SE is such a crude tool - all it does is taking care of the menial task of counting clearly staked territory. If the SE ‘leads you’ to any ‘tesuji’ because it hasn’t clearly marked a region on the board, then you are unable to identify obvious territory.
2 Likes
yes I agree with you!
2 Likes
I don’t think so.
When the game is in progress things are not settled. You must decide what is yours and what isn’t, what’s dead or alive, what can be reduced and so on.
You must imagine what the following of the game will be.
I think that at our level everybody would give a different number.
It’s actually a good exercise to compare your counting with other players.
4 Likes
I get what you mean.
I guess I had in mind settled situations, SE usually doesn’t give points on areas that are “can go either way for now”. If it does, I don’t pay attention, I guess, or it’s not the way I use it.
2 Likes