The documentation is not clear on how to manually mark stones in seki. Essentially it says “click on stones to mark alive or dead” but more detail on how things should look for seki would be appreciated (perhaps a screenshot)?
I believe there can be cases where both players agree that a situation is seki, but cannot agree on whether the scoring tool properly shows the stones as being in seki.
I just had a game where my opponent appeared to be confused. Stones flashed alive and dead quite rapidly (I did not mark anything) and it appeared he was trying to mark the seki. We resolved the situation by me resigning - I was sufficiently down that even if I “killed” the stones in question it would not have mattered.
I now have another game featuring what is currently (IMO) a seki, and I want to be sure myself how to mark this. Even better, I would like a reference to point my opponent to in case of disagreement.
Well the problem is that if the score tool decides that the stones aren’t in a seki and one of the two groups is just dead. Isn’t that a problem where you’d want to know how to correct it?
Also I imagine the mumble mumble involves marking dame points as neutral.
Seki stones should be left as alive (i.e., not marked as dead which fades them out). For Japanese rules, any eyes held by stones in seki should also be marked as non-points (which the site shows as small blue squares) by clicking on those points.
The Japanese rules have all sorts of complications, and anti-seki is certainly one of them. However, stones that are technically dead under anti-seki are not removed from the board for scoring purposes, so for the sake of scoring anti-sekis properly on this site, those dead stones in anti-seki are also left as alive. Or so, I think, but there are always weird edge cases in the Japanese rules, so maybe someone can find a convoluted example where that’s not even correct.
I’ve written about anti-seki in another thread over several posts starting here:
There isn’t a special marker for seki.
Seki is defined as “mutual life”: both groups are alive since noone can kill the other.
So, for the purposes of scoring tool, stones in seki are just alive.
Clicking on them you can repeatedly change their status from alive to dead to alive again and so on.
So just check that both groups are “marked as alive” and you’re done.
There’s a special marker for dame/neutral points which maybe you need to mark yourself if the auto-score wasn’t behaving.
What’s the best way to test out the auto score on certain board positions?
Can one just fork a game from a position near the end, invite another player to play from that point (which is presumably unranked - although it probably forgets about captures) and then go to scoring to test out the auto-score.
It might be handy to know about some way like that if you did want to create a position quickly to either show to someone or to add a screenshot to the documentation say. Maybe the advice will be
Our autoscore often fails on sekis, no need to test that I can asure you
Usually clicking the stones is enough to fix the issue, sometimes it is better to click the territory instead, it can get a bit finicky.
If the scoring is super stubborn, there is a last emergency tool to try and shift+click which marks the stones sort of one by one, without the computer trying to assume anything.
However, all that said there is a plan to switch to a completely different algorithm soon, so fingress crossed with a bit of luck the issue might disappear completely.
