The developers have indicated that currently, it’s not in their immediate plans. However, if there’s significant interest, they may consider starting work on it.
I’m 12k and I’ve been playing this cool style of go where I always go for the center, but without a group tax scoring system, it makes it less fun
I would also suggest a “self fill in” button that let’s GNU Go fill in all but two of the intersections on every group. This “button” would only be available after move 200 or so.
But yeah, I think professional go championships should be played with the stone scoring/group tax method, but what do I know
I’d also like to point out that the code that defines the rulesets/scoring lives in an open source library:
So “significant interest” could also be manifested as code contributions, which would significantly reduce the barrier to making the feature a reality.
So, this rule slightly punishes big number of groups.
Rule with more unusual result:
Player who has more than 1 group loses.
It may result in very peaceful game where both opponents are afraid that part of their group is separated. Separated group is possible to convert to 1-eye group later, but its big loss of points.
Or someone may attempt to cut board in half like in Hex. Then opponent would be able to take territory from 1 side of board only and it most likely would not be enough.
I think stone scoring also allows to explore important aspects of the game instead of being told about them (eyes, life, territory) and it would be a good scoring method for beginners. So hereby I’m signing this petition.
As a compromise, what about player with the fewest groups wins, ties are broken with area scoring (+komi)? seems more elegant than just a special case for 1 group
That said, I’d see that as more the purview of variants, whereas stone scoring is not so much a variant per se, but just a different Scoring system which is not so popular today, but has some interesting (if subtle) strategic implications
Stone scoring is like area scoring with group tax, but it accomplished by essentially making area worth zero points, and thus leaving eyes is penalty (for having many groups).
Area scoring: 1 point per living stone + 1 point per territory surrounded
Stone scoring: 1 point per living stone + 0 points per territory surrounded
So, another way to fine tune the penalty of group tax is to adopt something like this:
Hypothetical scoring: N point(s) per living stone + M point(s) per territory surrounded
Of course, it’s really only the relative size of M and N that matter. For example, any N = M > 0 is essentially equivalent to N = M = 1 (provided that one similarly scales komi).
To make the group tax effect greater, one could use N > 1, or even M < 0.
Note that if you do implement it, you’ll already have AI analysis for it, since Kata is trained on it already. That’s not true of most other rules variants though, just group tax rules.
