It’s actually pretty straightfoward. I’ve played games with relatives from like 6yo-13 yo. If the 6yo is happy to make a big dumpling on the board, I think that’s fine. As long as they get excited to play the game again and again, that’s probably better than trying to make them an SDK right away.
If they’re motivated enough to want to win, you just show them an area like Uberdude did
and fill it in in one case, and as above in another, and say it’s worth the same points, but it took many more moves to get the same result.
Similarly you can show them things like
to get an idea for efficiency. It made sense to the 13yo in a handicap game, that giving up the outside wasn’t worth it for points, and they immediately recognised after seeing something like this, that this is more or less what happened in the game that was played.
I think that depends on how much time you want to spend explaining A and B. It can sometimes be the case that the language and concepts of A are more complicated than the language and concepts of B, for some reason, probably due to previous knowledge. It might be easier to grasp B, and then understand A through B, than it is to understand A from the start, and then try to look at B after.
Case in point, who would explain Go to a beginner with Tromp-Taylor Rules at Sensei's Library and then try to show that Chinese or Japanese rules were more or less the same afterward. The terminology is much more of a hassle, even if it’s elegant.
Assume both players have played the same number of moves N. The Japanese rule consists in putting back Black’s prisoners inside Black’s territory at the end, so to calculate Black’s score you calculate
Black’s territory - black dead stones = Black’s territory + black living stones - N = (count all black) -N.
Same for white.
I think the way I’ve seen people go about it is to say that since every stone on the board is worth a point in Area (Chinese say) rules, when a stone is removed from the board by being captured that player loses a point naturally.
In Territory (Japanese rules) to keep the same idea, when a stone is captured one should lose a point per capture, but if one is only counting empty space, then losing an extra empty space per captured stone at the end would be equivalent to losing a point per stone captured. So filling in captures at the end has the same effect to just losing a stone in Area rules.
Ok.
Just consider you explain that to a 6yr old beginner.
First the count all
Then we can count only empty.
Why?
Because we played same quantity of stones so we can not count them. But to make it work we have to put back the prisoners on the board.
Your formula is like same, starting from reverse. Harder to get it in my opinion.
You don’t need to be SDK to understand that image.
I have taught many 6yo-12yo children and I go straight to @uberdude’s example (while using the metaphore of castles and courtyards and inner space scoring points) without any intermediate steps about living stones scoring points.
IME it’s not hard to understand even for a novice 6yo. It might be harder for children under 5, but I don’t teach children that young, so I don’t really know.
I rarely explain A(area scoring), because our national go association follows B(territory scoring), so there is no need to confuse novice children with information that is mostly redundant. Though my guess is that when a player understands A or B well enough, understanding the other and the near equivalence of both is not very hard.
Japanese rules seem perfectly intuitive to me. Go is a war game in which we capture territory and enemy soldiers. The winner has the most captures (territory and soldiers combined, leaving aside komi and handicap stones for purposes of illustration). This is easily understood by kids, and it is in fact how it is scored right here on OGS: if you click the score, you see that territory and prisoners are added together; it’s not territory minus the prisoners that you lost. Using enemy prisoners to fill in their captured territory is just a convenience of manual counting.
I want to show them how to play so they can play against each other and have fun. I’m not a go trainer who tries to create strong players. I just try to get more people to play go and enjoy, whatever their level.
I think basically it boils down to my emotions towards the scoring robot. Like, logically it might make more sense the New way, but emotionally it is just not as pleasant.
Old scoring robot was soft and kind. “Sure thing I’ll be happy to do that for ya! You mind if I figure out these here stones myself? I mean seems pretty obvious where y’all gonna move next so I can just save you both a lil time. I like countin’ ya know, I’m a robot, we are good at it.”
New scoring robot is “No human! You must place a stone in the wall. I don’t care how long the other player takes to do it. Opponent must also place the stone in the wall, where the hole is. You must both do it! All the walls! All the holes! Or no Robot Scoring for You!”
Well, new scoring robot is katago-based, isn’t it? I wonder if there was an issue where letting the robot figure out unfinished borders led to katago being like “LOL IT’S ALL DEAD! I CAN KILL IT ALL WITH THIS ONE EXTRA MOVE ON THE OPEN BOUNDARY” and leading to a…less pleasant experience. Probably not, but I enjoy the thought.
the same thing. For example this super weird game where I won with scores 27 - 9 and aftermath received the different calculation and the result that my opponent won.
