Hypothetical play seems such an obviously inferior and artificially complex system, I don’t think I had ever heard somebody argue for it or even saying it’s a matter of taste.
I understand the argument for Japanese rules on the ground that it’s easier to count, but this leaves me a bit stomped. 
It makes more sense if you think of it less like a prescriptive method and more like a documentation of a process observed in practice.
Imagine you had to write down the rules of a game that is already being played according to “generally understood” principles. But be careful not to write anything that contradicts these established ways, or the players will get mad at you. Just make sure that they clearly state what is really happening. 
Well, you go and ask around: what would you do if you could not see what is dead and what is alive? The answer: hypothetical play, with some ko fixes to make sure that there is no spooky action at a distance from ko threats.
Is there not some value in a ruleset that is built on observed practice and traditional expectations, rather than rigorous theory? If the choice of ruleset is irrelevant anyway because edge cases do not occur in practice, could the practical approach not be the preferable one?
I have never seen this answer, other than from players already accustomed to Japanese rules.
It’s the opposite: beginners are frequently confused and feel like Japanese rules are so weird because if the other player doesn’t accept something as dead you have to lose points by playing further… and somebody, here or elsewhere, has to explain this weird “hypothetical play” concept, precisely because it’s so not intuitive!
It happened even in this thread, and is generally a staple of beginner’s questions in Go forums alongside “I don’t understand this ko-based tsumego”.
There is a tendency by some cynics who have given up on nuance in criticism, who have fervently bought into some meme-like dislike of Japanese rules, to apply this prior belief as a scapegoat to all sorts of confused beginner situations.
Maybe this happens due to a human longing to be contrarian, to be the one to see the faults in the system and topple the mighty establishment. 
Like finally changing the OGS rank system (again), which people also love to hate on.
Regardless, Japanese rules are widespread, “intuitive” is subjective, and confused beginners will always exist.
I think you’re glossing over the fact that the criticisms of Japanese rules have been well documented by the likes of Jasiek and yebellz
Japanese rules are widespread, and a common argument in their favor is that it is perceived as easier to count than Chinese rules (though I do think it’s mostly cultural influence).
However, I never heard the “hypothetical play” as a positive side. I think it’s quite commonly seen as a weakness of Japanese rules, and for good reasons. It’s a bit easy to dismiss this as being cynical or contrarian.
This is also why western rulesets like AGA chose to avoid this issue. I don’t think anybody tasked to design an intuitive Go ruleset without the burden of “tradition” would end up with such a thing as Japanese rules.
I dislike how Japanese rules deal with unusual cases, but unusual cases happen very rarely. I never was in situation where I would need to actually do “hypothetical play”.
There is no glossing over anything. Again, Japanese rules have received much well-deserved criticism, and I have acknowledged that.
The way that AGA rules allow both territory and area counting is great, more power to them.
However, there is just so much hyperbole and rigid opinions brought up as “arguments”, that I want to encourage everyone to come back down and tell it with facts instead.
Is hypothetical play unintuitive, while “just playing it out” under other rulesets is intuitive? It really differs from person to person. They might change their mind when they see some rules beast that breaks the intuition.
Do beginners really find Japanese rules in particular confusing? Someone who cannot explain the differences in their own words? Picture a public demonstration where a parent has brought their small child with them. You ask the child what they think of the topic, and they have a very strong opinion that matches the parent’s. They believe it very strongly, but really don’t know what they are talking about.
I think that one can make a much stronger case against Japanese rules based on their dubious wordings (“enable a stone”) and failings in “rare cases that never happen”. This is how Jasiek does his commentary, and we see such a case in this recent thread.
We are so far off topic but I can’t help but add my take at this point.
Japanese rules are specifically intended to be hard for beginners because they demand that you do things “properly”. They don’t permit the cop out of dumping an extra stone or two in your own territory “just in case” or because you are “not sure” if it’s safe it not. With Japanese rules you have to work it out exactly or take a points hit. So this favours more skilled players. And I think that is the point.
It’s also why Japanese rules are good for beginners because it discourages bad habits around sticking extra stones where they are not needed (which also loses points in Chinese rules when done before only even Dame remain) and encourages proper reading.
I don’t think this was a conscious choice. I think the official Japanese rules were just created to formalise the game for professional competition, not taking into consideration how easy or difficult it might be for beginners to apply those rules in their own games.
Although perhaps they tried to do something to accomodate amateurs by including “article 0”: These rules must be applied in a spirit of good sense and mutual trust between the players.
I bet that in many sports the rules are not as strictly applied for casual amateur players as they are for professionals in official matches. And don’t forget that go has been played for milennia without any formal written rules. So I think it’s fine for beginners and amateur players to deviate a bit from the latest version of official Japanese rules.
Like in casual amateur OTB games an illegal move can usually be retracted and played elsewhere with no further consequences, instead of losing by forfeit as would be the case in an official professional game (article 14).
I don’t think article 13 (both players lose) has ever been invoked in an official amateur game, even though it might be the proper adjucation of OP game (and many other beginner games) when fully adhering to the official Japanese rules.
Also, you’re not hurting anyone when you and your opponent agree to not fill all dame before scoring, even though you should according to the official Japanese rules (article 8).
And you’re not hurting anyone when in case of a group status disagreement during scoring, you play it out with pass stones instead of hypothetical play (similar to the Lasker-Maas territory scoring procedures). I think it’s more practical and pretty much equivalent in the vast majority of cases.
With such modifications, you may not be playing strictly under the official Japanese rules, but you’re definitely still playing go.
I think beginner question about life & death and autoscore confusion (aji missed by the players, but not by autoscore) are far more common than questions about procedures to settle group status disagreements. And those beginner questions rarely have anything to do with the specific ruleset that the game was played under.
That’s not the definition of territory according to the Japanese rules though.
Very true.
Samraku is right, gennan scored the game incorrectly.
This is not a question about “should” or “should not”, that’s not how rules work. The Japanese rules do not permit players to decide on how to score the game.
What should happen when 2 players pass too early? Scoring mode should not activate?
Thank you for that testimony!
After reading your whole post though, I can’t help but be comforted in my opinion that Japanese rules for beginners can only work if there is an experienced teacher supervising the games, and even then, the beginners will lose points when they capture dead groups.
In other words, it’s absurd to have Japanese rules as the default on an online server which is many beginners’ first contact with the game of go.
The Japanese rules of Go should not be used for online play. In my opinion they should not be used ever even in OTB games. They should be put in a museum.
Yes, it is. These moves need to played. It is true that they do not need to be played “according to the rules” if both players agree on that. Just to reiterate:
The quoted text explains that filling dame by playing actual moves (instead of passing) is not necessary (if the players agree to skip them). You can think of those stones similarly to other parts of the mechanical counting / prisoner-backfilling / rearranging procedure that happens on physical boards, after the game. Online games are auto-counted by the server and are complete at two passes.
My goal was to give OP an overall idea of the scoring process without dwelling on details that might confuse them unnecessarily. Aiming more for pedagogy than rigour.
I use a cyclic teaching approach, as you might find in primary and secondary education, where topics are revisited as students progress, adding more nuance and detail in each iteration, rather than an academic approach of teaching everything in one go.
Like, General Relativity is the most accurate theory of gravity, but we still teach Newtonian gravity to ~15 year olds, even though it’s arguably incorrect.
So I scored the game based on some assumptions about which stones the players might have considered dead when they passed, and then I used a territory scoring procedure to score the game.
Perhaps I should have said “Japanese-like rules” instead of “Japanese rules” to make it clear that I wasn’t referring strictly to the J89 rules, but more a simplified version of those, but I think adding such caveats to my post would have served little purpose for OP (assuming he is not a mathematician).
I’d say that in practice there is already ambiguity as to what is meant exactly by “Japanese rules”.
Each server that supposedly supports Japanese rules in fact uses their own version of Japanese-like rules, rather than strictly following the J89 rules.
Pandanet for example counts territory in seki, and I suppose all servers disable illegal moves rather than adjudicating the game as forfeited.
Many go servers count territory inside even when outside dame are not filled, even though this violates J89 rules.
So I did what I usually do when teaching beginners how to score their OTB games and use a procedure that is closer to Lasker-Maas rules than to J89 rules.
I might also have chosen something closer to Spight rules. In that case, I think M13 would not count as black territory because M12 is in atari.
Or I could have declared some (supposedly) living groups as seki and not count any points in the upper right and lower left (and perhaps the right side), which I think would be closer to J89 rules.
I did consider using those alternatives for my example scoring of OP position, but decided not to, because I thought it was unnecessary detail and potentially confusing for OP who didn’t seem to have a clear understanding of life & death and territory. So I’d rather leave it for another time when they reach a better understanding of the game.
So how would you score it (given that it was played under Japanese rules)?
Yes, I also think area scoring rules like Chinese or AGA are more suitable for self-teaching beginners.
But I think the problem is identifying which new OGS users are self-teaching beginners. Though I suppose this is possible now, because they can now identify themselves as “new to the game”.
Yes, but they also effectively lose points doing that when playing under area scoring rules (they do it early in the game, not waiting until all dame are filled). I don’t think scoring rules would make any difference. The remedy is them improving. IME around 20k they gradually start to avoid redundant moves a bit.
I think roughly half of the go players in the world use some form of Japanese-like rules, including many in the west, so good luck with trying to abolish it.
Personally I’m more in favour of improving those rules, but even that is very difficult, given how many have tried already.
Both Chinese-like rules and Japanese-like rules are different interpretation of same idea and that’s why winner is usually same in both scoring methods.
They appeared before someone created clear text with rules to use in official tournaments.
So in fact in different places slightly different versions are played.
it already happened on OGS: most people ignore filling dame and if you do it anyway while ignoring their passes, they would think that this is “stalling”
What is this statement trying to achieve? This seems to be the linguistical equivalent to my average Go move.
I really appreciate you trying to help a beginner and I also appreciate your well thought out and wise comments to most topics in this forum.
But I disagree with your approach in this concrete scenario. While the determination of life/death can be difficult, the determination of territory is not when the rules are followed correctly. Not reading/following the rules before/while playing makes playing any board game (even modern ones like Monopoly or Carcassonne) difficult.
IMO it’s better to explain to beginners that they have not finished the game and need to continue playing instead of trying to incorrectly calculate a score.
Scoring can only happen once the game has ended (see §10.1). The game ends after the confirmation of territory (see §9.2). The confirmation of territory requires that players fill the Dame (see Co§9.1).
Therefore the game did not end yet and cannot be scored according to the Japanese rules. Scoring the game at this point would by itself be a violation of the Japanese rules, specifically Co§9.1
I assume you mean rules that use territory-based counting? I’m not sure if rules using territory-based counting have to be bad (that does appear to be the case though) but I also haven’t spend that much time with that topic.
I’m not trying to universally abolish it. I just want OGS to succeed and I want OGS to pick/create a good ruleset and stick to that. So I do wish that OGS abolishes it.
To me that seems like an unusual interpretation of J89 rules, basically prohibiting passes until the game can be scored properly?
So should the server then disable the pass button until the game is fully over (including dame filling)? Or should it adjudicate a loss or a void result to both players when they pass prematurely?