This is like the Go version of Minesweeper 
5 Likes
That gives me an idea for an alternative way to play:
You guess one stone at a time, instead of all at once, and your score is how many stones you manage to place before you guess incorrectly. Could be done here by numbering the stones in your guess according to your confidence in each stone, but would be more fun to play in an interactive setting where you get immediate feedback when you fail (then you could also have a three strike system, so you can afford to miss once or twice, which will give you some extra information to work with).
It could also be played as a two-player game, where the players take turns guessing stones.
4 Likes
That’s why I mentioned the variations (which I forgot to do btw 
), because the first stones I was fairly sure, the last ones not so much.
1 Like
Results from second round
Several players came very close, and @harleqin managed to get all 14 stones correct!
| Player | Score |
|---|---|
@harleqin 
|
14-0 = 14 |
| @Groin | 12-2 = 10 |
| @mark5000 | 12-2 = 10 |
| @shinuito | 11-3 = 8 |
| @claire_yang | 11-3 = 8 |
| @Gia | 6-8 = -2 |
Full game here:
Bonus points to @shinuito who correctly identified white as Lee Changho! I remember Yeonwoo said that there’s no way to tell who is playing just from the moves. Well, apparently @shinuito can do it without even seeing the opponent’s stones! What’s next, identifying the black player from only seeing the white stones? 
Round 3
This one is a little harder than the last one. 16 black stones are missing:
Demo board
Feel free to share your guess either as a screenshot here or as a variation in the demo board chat. I’ll stick to the same scoring system for now, for consistency: +1 point for each correctly placed black stone and -1 point for each incorrectly placed black stone.
Note that you do not have to place exactly 16 stones. If you’re pretty certain about 10 of them, but unsure about the remaining 6, you might prefer to aim for a safe 10 points, rather than risking lots of minus points.
I will reveal the real board position 2021-01-09T17:00:00Z. Maybe someone else would like to post a new challenge after that?
7 Likes
It makes sense it’s Lee Changho playing white. My sense of awkward lower side 2 space jump too slow and passive is his style of slow build-up and push. And it’s early 2000 games, pros nowadays are way more aggressive comparably (or Chinese players in general)
1 Like
That one is much harder
I posted my guess as a variation (sorry for no screenshot, but my laptop is acting up lately, I hate mandatory Edge and ALL its mandatory updates).
2 Likes
Results from round 3
Takemiya Masaki (B) vs Kato Masao (W)
A very impressive performance from @mark5000, getting 15/16 stones correct! As can be seen from the scores, this round was significantly harder than the last.
| Player | Score |
|---|---|
|
@mark5000
|
15-0 = 15 |
| @Groin | 7-4 = 3 |
| @shinuito | 7-9 = -2 |
| @Gia | 3-10 = -7 |
| @Harleqin | 3-13 = -10 |
I’ll let anyone who feels like it make the next round. Just pick a game position, put the white stones onto a demo board, and share it here!
You may change the scoring system if you prefer, or don’t score at all and let players decide themselves how well they did. I think the scoring I used so far works pretty well, but it is a little bit tedious to do the counting by hand (and I might have made a mistake somewhere), so I don’t want to make someone else do that if they don’t want to 
4 Likes
Round 4
16 black stones are missing:
Feel free to share your guess either as a screenshot here or as a variation in the demo board chat. This time, you get +2 points for each correctly placed black stone and -1 point for each incorrectly placed black stone.
You need not place exactly 16 stones. If you’re pretty certain about 10 of them, but unsure about the remaining 6, you might prefer to aim for a safe 20 points, rather than risking lots of negative points.
I will reveal the real board position when this post is at least 24 hours old.
4 Likes
I also has an interesting one
There are 21 black stones total at this point, where the game essentially began a new phrase at this point.
I’ll make each stone right with 2 scores, and no penalty for guess it wrong, since I know this is a hard one. But I’ll added a bonus of 10 scores for guessing who eventually win this game, bonus 4 scores guessing the naturality of the players (each color), and each 20 additional scores to names them. (And automatically get full 100 to point out which game this is, since if you know it, you obviously get them all).
1 Like
My attempt
Something is obviously wrong with my guess in the lower left corner. The stones at C7 have a very strange shape, so some black stone is missing there but I can’t figure out which. Also I suspect that not all of the black stones I put in that corner are actually there, since then cut at F3 has too much aji. But I think most of those stones should be there.
For the other corners, I’m somewhat confident in the stones placed, but clearly there are more stones missing that I’m too unsure about to place.
I put L17 there to justify white having made a one-space extension.
I considered guessing both C15 and D15 at once, netting me a guaranteed 1 point if only one of them is correct. But low approach feels slightly more likely to me, so I went with that.
2 Likes
Surely someone else wants to make a guess as well? 
My guess also as a variation in the game.
(for anyone interested, Windows now has a shortcut for screen snip (or at least I found out about it) Win-Shift-S, which I’m very happy about and I think the iOther crowd has had since forever)
2 Likes
I’m probably stating the obvious, but although I can’t personally do it, I love that the mindset to solve these is also “hm, why would a pro do such thing?”.
3 Likes
I know exactly which game it is, so I don’t know if I should join this
1 Like