Is there a bug in counting?

In this game https://online-go.com/game/6614932 black wins by 0.5 points. But I thought in japanese counting there are no points in seki. Nevertheless black got 2 points in the lower left seki.

Am I missing something or is this a bug?

Well, without really studying the example, the AI that determines live/dead groups is not 100% foolproof and especially sekis can be difficult.
You should have probably changed the status of the groups manualy in scoring. That’s why it is not scored automaticly, but requires both players to agree.

Yes the score is wrong. It looks like the life/death status of the groups is marked correctly. Checking the “strict scoring” option during counting might fix this. Anyone know for sure?

Maybe it would be time to remove the automatic scoring and force people to actually mark dead stones(and dead territory) manually (if they want to get points…). Relying on this automatic thing only teaches people falsely to think that computer will do it 100% of the time. Then BOOM once in a while it doesn’t work as expected.

6 Likes

sounds reasonable. i would be all for it!
sadly i fear some might think it an encouragement to start an argument. even if automatic counting is unreliable and often wrong, it is still some kind of authority that helps end the game.
it can also be very useful to beginners.

Maybe a better solution would be to first use the automatic scoring function like it is now but still force both players to click on the dead stones. Like a double confirmation thing. Best of both worlds.

2 Likes

You guys aren’t addressing the OP’s issue. The status of the groups is correct, but the score is wrong.

1 Like

Well, I am far from being an expert, but if they thought it was seki they should have changed the status to neutral and it would not been counted, right? I am seeing two points of territory marked for black there. Or am I missing something?

Well, I am quite willing to bet that that would lead to quite an increase in wrong scoring :smiley: to be honest I myself am terrible at counting unless I can physicly move the stones.

You can change the status of the points? I thought you can only change status of groups.

Edit: Aha I just tried it, you can click on territories also, to toggle them on or off.

It seems there is still a problem. In this game 친선 대국 black should capture a stone and so get a point. But Black didn’t capture and instead of loosing a point he gained two.

2 Likes

I think you’re right that with Japanese rules, there should be no points in seki. Note, during the scoring phase, players could have manually clicked D18 and D19 to mark them as “no points”.

As for whether it’s a bug or not, I don’t believe the system even tries to detect whether an eye is part of seki or not. In most rulesets it doesn’t matter anyway. If you know of an algorithm to detect these situations reliably, please share, but to me that sounds like a hard problem and it is okay to rely on manual scoring for these types of situations.

The “estimate score” button seems to know to not mark the territory in seki:

Screenshot_20221214-080843

So it’s probably not really that hard. Since autoscore (I think) uses the same technology it might just be an oversight causing it to do the wrong thing.

1 Like

From that screenshot, it looks like D18 is marked as Black’s territory?

1 Like

I think it’s the location of a future stone, which we don’t have a way to display.

1 Like

So I think thats kind of what I mean by difficulty- how does one use the information that D18=black and D19=empty to get D18, D19 both empty?

(I think @joachim said earlier that both spaces should be empty as-is, but that Black should explicitly capture to get the extra point)

Yes, in this case it might get a bit tricky. If black looses the game with one point after the correct capture, he might not capture and get two points more going ahead to win the game by one point.
White can not force black to captur, so the outcome relies on a discussion between the players.

I guess that’s not at all a bad thing. After all Go is a game of social interaction in my opinion.
But that is a different topic. :slight_smile:

1 Like

1 Like

But Katago or whatever is estimating the score knows it’s filled, and it just doesn’t have a channel for communicating that back to the app for scoring. So it’s not like it’s an algorithmic challenge, just some annoying detail of the implementation.

But I think the autoscore is somehow worse than this, doesn’t it not even mark the easy territory in seki (like the one in this example on the left edge) as dame? Unfortunately it’s kind of hard to test autoscore since you have to play out a whole game to get to it.

:+1: athough it’s maybe not a so different topic.
So instead of trying to get the perfect and never buggy autoscoring, we could promote the discussion between the 2 players when doubt, and give more ergonomy for the tools of the moderators. I may be wrong but helping and contributing in these rare cases should be more enjoyable for them as tracking the deviants of internet.

1 Like