Just a brief question

Asking out of curiosity, is there actually a difference between Korean and Japanese rules on OGS? Or is it just political correctness of letting both Koreans and Japanese play under “their” rules by having two labels for one ruleset. Just wondering :grinning:

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Interesting question. I didn’t realise that Korea had a different rule set. The only difference I thought was komi in an even game.

Check out the rules matrix here.

Heh, I like that idea of a dummy option to make all feel good.
here you go, the difference seems to be in stone removal.

/edit: @mlopezviedma – you win for now!

Aren’t Korean and Japanese stone removal rules the same?

All I find to korean rules in english is this commentary by Robert Jasniek.
I’ll come back as soon as I mastered korean. (Maybe you’re right though, we would need to summon @matburt or @anoek)

In theory, between the actual rules sets, there may be some very technical and esoteric differences, which I don’t fully understand, but it seems that they are virtually identical for common, practical purposes.

On this site, however, I think the Korean and Japanese rules are practically identical, since the de facto practice for stone removal when playing under all rules is just mutual agreement. I suppose, in theory, a dispute preventing mutual agreement during stone removal could be adjudicated by the moderators while applying the minute technical details on the respective rule set. However, again in practice, players are instead allowed to (and often end up) resuming play in such situations, which also seems to violate both of Japanese and Korean rules.

The actual site implementation, the “rules matrix”, and the corresponding official rules sets don’t seem to be in full agreement.

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Sometimes, the rule matrix differs from the site implementation, such as the AGA handicap compensation bug (recently fixed) or Ko rule under Ing rules.

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And sometimes the rules matrix just isn’t clear enough, like what exactly are “Japanese/Korean stone removal rules”? or Chinese compensation for every handicap stone, which is interpreted in such a way that when there is a one rank difference, white gets an extra point even through no handicap stones are placed.

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I’m looking at the code now, and it looks like the implementation has the rulesets the same in every way but name:

I tried to find a relevant difference in Jasiek’s comparison, but as @yebellz points out, the site does not adhere to either ruleset close enough for these nuances to matter.

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Fwiw the main difference between Japanese and Korean rules is L/D evaluation: Japanese analysis uses global play with special ko rules (the pass for ko rule), Korean uses local play (restricted to the disputed region) with normal ko rules.

I guess this doesn’t matter much in practice, at most the autoscore needs to be manually corrected in some rare cases.

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