But you don’t understand… It wouldn’t make any difference. Opponents could’ve captured those stones under Japanese rules as well if they wanted to show the deadness of the stones. That’s not what happens in those games. What happens is that at some point you hit pass, they hit pass, the game is scored either by system or your opponent and you’re already confused. Chinese rules allowing to capture dead stones doesn’t help because that’s not what happens. It could be helpful for some already experienced beginner who want opponent to prove dead stones. But absolute beginner doesn’t even know what dead stones are, not really. They just hit pass, are presented with the result, and it’s like what is this, why it’s like this, why I can click on things to change it, should i change it.
Well, here the thing: unless we allow beginners to self-identify when signing up, we need to have the same scoring system for new players as we do for established players.
So unless you’re proposing that every single player playing Chinese rules be forced to capture all of the stones in order for a game to be scored correctly, I’m not sure I follow.
I think it was just that you can capture the dead stones without penalty.
As in if your opponent disagrees with you that a group is dead, you can just resume and prove it and it doesn’t cost you anything like it would in Japanese rules.
It can be the case in 9x9 for instance (more likely I mean), that the opponent disputing the deadness of some stones because they’re still on the board and you capturing to prove it, loses you the game in Japanese rules.
But yeah I suppose it doesn’t solve the case where they don’t know they can capture something, or that the autoscore might show something different than they expect.
Also on 19x19, if you captured a lot of your opponents stones and spend many moves removing them because it doesn’t cost you any points, it might be a bit boring for the opponent to just keep passing and waiting for you to be done.
So probably capturing dead stones in the case of disagreement is the main plus.
Well, mostly, it doesn’t solve the fact that beginners have no idea what the scoring screen is supposed to represent, which I believe is what @Allerleirauh was pointing out.
Beginners often have incorrectly scored games because they don’t know what they’re supposed to do, not because they’re afraid that playing with Japanese rules will penalize them when resuming the game – unless they’re explicitly told so by some ill-advised mid-kyu teacher, I guess.
In fact, I would have a hard time believing there’s a statistically significant amount of beginners who even know what Japanese rules or Chinese rules are. (Most of them don’t even seem to understand that the purpose of Go is to make territory rather than capture stones).
(That said, I would support Chinese or AGA rules being made the default, I just don’t think it would get anywhere near solving this specific problem by itself)
I don’t disagree that OGS’ scoring system can be terribly confusing. I’m not saying either that switching from Japanese to Chinese would magically solve every problem on OGS and in the world. And if you really think that it’s pointless to make any suggestion that wouldn’t magically solve everything, I don’t see what’s the point of telling me “You don’t understand”, as telling me that “I don’t understand” (Don’t understand what? I don’t know) is not going to magically solve every problem either. Have a good day.
The point of Chinese rules instead of Japanese rules is that you can actually play out the sequences and capture the stones that you want to capture. So you don’t even need to mark any stones as dead and ask for your opponent’s agreement. And, more importantly, you can try things out if you’re not sure, without fearing of losing ten points because you played ten dead stones or ten moves inside your territory.
No one is proposing that.
So are you proposing that beginners should just not be shown the scoring screen at all, or maybe that they should be instructed to never pass until some conditions are met? (In which case, what would those conditions be and how would you explain them?)
I think an interactive tutorial about scoring, covering the various common beginner mistakes (like premature pass) and questions (like “if I play a dead stone in their territory and they have to play 4 moves to capture it won’t they lose points?”) would a hugely valuable contribution to the go world, which is why I now suggest it to people who want to make Yet Another Go Server like https://www.reddit.com/r/baduk/comments/102nvyt/comment/j2ufvt8/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3.
Technically there is something like that here on OGS, but it’s definitely not clear enough for beginners to understand, and probably not as interactive as you were thinking.
I just found this in the code, it appears to be a tutorial covering all the crucial points (I think), but I’m not aware of it being implemented anywhere on the site?
I think what is missing there is an explanation of the score and why the score does not change anymore once the game is finished. That helped me understand it and it’s not as trivial as it might seem. Something simple as “Playing into your territory loses you one point. Playing into your opponents territory gives them one point. This makes passing the best move when the territory boundaries have been established. If both players keep playing they lose the same amount of points, so if you are uncertain if the game is finished, e.g. if you do not know if a group is alive, you can (and should) keep on playing.”
It would be slightly easier to understand with Chinese rules, but even those should be motivated. One could even think about giving the historical motivation for the rules from the senseis library:
"Originally, the goal of Go was to place as many of your stones as possible on the board. This required filling the board (almost) completely with stones after the boundaries of the territories had been settled. The monotony of this filling-in led players to invent mathematical shortcuts to calculate the score earlier in the game. However, some of these shortcuts came to seem unnatural once players were no longer used to thinking of filling the board with stones as the goal of the game, and were dropped. "
And then have them play the encore (placing stones until every move for one of the players would be self atari) to see that the score does not change.