Please add Stone-Counting to OGS: teach go to beginners!

OGS Development
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I’ve lately had the pleasure of teaching Go to several beginners, and I’ve been looking for ways to streamline the process. Many online resources recommend beginners first try playing online games on OGS.
I’m inclined to agree- compared to the other servers, it’s very user-friendly.

From my teaching efforts, a few things have become clear to me. The rules of Go’s gameplay are the model of elegance. However, to a beginner, our modern scorings systems are confusing or even incomprehensible.

The most common beginner questions you will see on reddit are questions about scoring the game. The players are often using Japanese rules, and they don’t understand concepts like territory, eyes, or life-and-death. It puts them in the frustrating position where game-scoring is a subjective process that depends on their understanding of game strategy. When they can’t agree with their opponent on what the score is, they rely on reddit users to referee the game. In other words, it’s very difficult for beginners to even get through an entire game.

For these reasons, I used to prefer teaching beginners Chinese rules - but even then it’s common to see games where territories aren’t fully sealed off from opposing stones.

That’s why I’ve switched to teaching stone counting. It’s objective, and very easy to understand (one stone = one point), so they can play independently. The core game strategy isn’t affected, and it even has its roots in Chinese tradition. The best part is it actually forces the players to ‘play it out’ for every group of stones on the board. This can be tedious for an advanced player, but it’s not for a beginner - for them, this process is still new, fresh, and interesting… And of course, by playing this way, they can get a better sense of the strategic concepts necessary for modern scoring systems.

I know that OGS is a first-destination for beginner players. Because of this, I think it would be of great benefit to provide them the option of scoring by stone-counting.
I’m of the opinion that this should be standard teaching practice in non-Asian cultures where people do not have a cultural familiarity with the game - but I digress.

Even I’m wrong, and it’s a bad way to teach, I think it would be neat to have that scoring system available.
Any opinions on this?
Is it possible to do?

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I won’t be against adding it, i mean if it can help.

Now i m always afraid some fun to be gone, as it can be more fastidious (tedious).

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Maybe have Chinese scoring with group tax instead?

Note: it’s not quite the same as stone counting. If you want, you could fill in your territory with stones (except 2 eyes), but you could also skip filling in the stones if you’re sure the territory is fully yours and cannot be invaded successfully. The end result would be as if you would use stone scoring, but for bigger boards (13x13 and 19x19) it would be easier by avoiding the extra work at the end.

Another idea would be to just let OGS fill in the territories at the end (maybe an extra button that does it after both users pass?).

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I suspect if it’s introduced for the purpose of being a nice alternative beginner-friendly scoring mode, it would be better to not add any shortcuts to skip filling territory with stones, because doing so requires territory to be enclosed and precisely one of the issues is that absolute beginners often leave gaps.

Offering stone scoring for 7x7, 9x9, and 13x13 where you actually do need to place every stone probably would be okay. On these smaller boards it shouldn’t take as much time to fill in remaining territories, and beginners who get to the point of playing stone scoring on 13x13 especially and do start to see how the game divides into a “normal go” phase and a “fill up stones” phase are well-positioned to play with other scoring methods.

On the other hand, if you want to introduce this for the purpose of being an interesting alternate rule that is truer to the ancient history of Go, rather than as a beginner-oriented feature, than it could be done on any board size and without requiring filling stones.

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Why keep group tax given it will provoke irrelevant or even bad habits(connecting strong groups)? IMO filling all empty spaces to get score is pretty arbitrary and artificial rule/solution and keeping 2 empty spaces for eyes and not count them is even more arbitrary and artificial.

It looks like Go rules in the past didn’t include possibility of passing. Chinese came up with their solution to this and Japanese came up with theirs.

Keeping group tax is a relic that has no meaning, especially if you don’t know what was the initial meaning behind it in the first place(to make scoring correspond with existing rules at that time, which implied that you can “pass” only when there’re no legal moves left to play).

Everyone accepted Japanese style go setup with no fixed stones for the first 4 moves(even game). It seems like Chinese implemented territory counting in their area scoring too. I see no sense to accept changes that make game more restricted, or worse revive restrictive rules(superstitions) left out long in the past.

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I’m not suggesting making it the default. Does it hurt to even have it available as an option? I think it would be a nice addition.

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Sure, it could be a gimmick, but I’d advocate agains teaching it to utter beginners.

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Don’t you agree that stone counting is a scoring method that is very easy to understand? Group tax is a direct result of that scoring method and not at all arbitrary.

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Ok, I’ll put it differently. I think this scoring rules are bad, in a same way that atari go rules are bad. If you don’t believe me look at judo and bjj. Both have same origins, but because of different rules the game is different.

It’s bad because it teaches a bad habit. It makes game played differently from mainstream, globally accepted rules.

It’s arbitrary in a sense that you chose to count only number of stones as a final score and not take into account empty spaces.

It’s not an argument. It’s not easier to understand then territory scoring or area scoring.
You can make any additional rule, like count territory, and score will be a direct result of that scoring method and not at all arbitrary.

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Yes it is, because it doesn’t require to identify the area or territory of the players.

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If the scoring rule for Go literally was “the winner is the player with more stones on the board at the end of the game plus komi”, I would expect there to be far fewer beginner questions on reddit, discords, etc. asking for help in determining who won the game because they can’t even figure out how to do it themselves.

It definitely might not be easier to understand for you, but perhaps it could be because you’re experienced and already do understand the normal rules? For most ordinary people learning for the first time, I’d guess “literally just count the stones” is probably easier to understand. :slight_smile:

But you’re definitely right that it is a slightly different scoring rule from modern rules and in some cases can meaningfully shift the strategy.

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What?

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But we don’t have data on how many confused beginners would ask scoring questions on the internet if we had stone counting with group tax as a mainstream method.

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But it requires to identify stones, isn’t it?

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Yes, but that’s very easy. The players have placed the stones on the board themselves.

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Sure, we don’t know for sure because we don’t have such data. But I’m surprised you don’t have the common-sense intuition that it would reduce the number of beginners who are posting pictures of positions saying e.g. “Help us figure out who won this game, we can’t figure it out and don’t know what to do, here’s a picture of the final position” - that you think just as many would still be unable to figure it out - i.e. unable to figure out how to count who has more stones.

Or maybe you do have that intuition personally and would agree from common sense, but you’re making a point of emphasizing that we can’t always trust personal intuitions / common sense and it would be much more reliable of a conclusion if we actually did have data, but we don’t? If so, fair enough. :slight_smile:

(EDIT: fixed typo where there was one too many negations and clarified the wording)

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How it relates to your previous message? It’s like you just refuted it. What is the message then?

You suggest that if we had different counting it might have been easier for beginners. Now you say that common sense tells that it will be approximately the same.

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Apologies, it was a typo, good catch and sorry for the confusion. I edited the post to fix the wording.

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I will only write this.

All humans are mortal.
Steve is mortal.
=> “Steve is a human” is an illogical(logically false) claim.

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I don’t think anythig. I’m saying we have no evidence to draw conclusion. It might be as many, more or less. It can’t be used as to prove or refute whether stone counting is better or worse in terms of how many beginners will get confused.