Concord rules might be the best way to score Go while remaining close to its tradition. From Sensei’s Library:
How to Play Go with Concord Rules?
• When passing, place a pass stone in your opponent’s prisoner bowl. This gives the opponent one point, but since games typically end with two passes, this does not change the result.
• The first and last pass must be made by different players.
• Count every surrounded point as territory, even in seki. Seki (mutual life positions) eyes are points.
• When scoring is unclear, continue playing until all dead stones are captured. This does not change the game’s final score. […]Concord Rules achieve these important goals:
• Both territory and area scoring work. Both methods always give the same score.
• Every point counts. The rules preserve single-point precision in final scores, capturing skill differences that 2-point Chinese and AGA scoring might miss.
• Play Settles Disputes. When life and death is unclear, simply capture all the dead stones - the final score remains unchanged.
• [Game usually ends with two passes.]
The main feature of this ruleset can be traced back to the following comment by Bill Spight in 2013:
There is a simple way to implement double button go for territory scoring. Treat the buttons like passes. (Whether any pass lifts a ko or superko ban and how many passes end play can be treated separately.) The first player to pass hands over a pass stone, as usual. If the last player to pass is the same as the first player to pass, she does not hand over a pass stone for the last pass.
For some context, note that AGA rules produce an area scoring (Chinese style) result with both area and territory counting, while Concord rules produce a territory scoring (Japanese style) result with both area and territory counting.
The main advantage of territory scoring is that the smallest difference between two different results is one point. In area scoring, it’s two points unless the button is used. This greater granularity of territory scoring enables it to detect smaller skill differences than area scoring. It is also why komi under Japanese rules can be 4.5, 5.5, 6.5… whereas komi under Chinese rules has to jump from 5.5 to 7.5 to produce a different result.
I think Concord rules deserve to become the official international rules of Go. They have all the advantages of Japanese rules (ease of counting, greater granularity) and none of its drawbacks (explicit definition of life, no points in seki, hypothetical play required to resolve disputes, special cases, unintelligible rules…).