That’s not very helpful, but I tell myself that I’m good at figuring out why people come to different conclusions. You concluded that I made such an “illogical claim”, so I’ll try to figure out where you think I did that. I can’t see it yet.
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Oh, is it this one?
All beginner friendly rules are easy.
Stone counting is easy.
Illogical conclusion: Stone counting is beginner friendly.
This is a candidate too, but I can’t put it into a form to make it match yours:
Group tax is a direct result of stone counting, thus group tax is not arbitrary.
I happen to know Steve, and he is in fact human. Incidentally, Steve taught me how to play Go!
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100% agreed that territory scoring is hard and opaque and ill-suited to beginners.
IMO, it’s possible and (important) to make area scoring significantly more beginner-friendly than what we currently have, and it’s higher priority to do that than to add new types of scoring systems.
Anecdotally, I taught my niece and nephew (5 and 7) Go with area scoring (NZ rules) on 9x9 when I visited over the winter break.
They understood the rules and scoring pretty quickly, just 2-3 games. They still had no concept of eyes, but that didn’t matter. They could play with each other, agree on when to pass (mostly they just captured stuff to be sure), and count accurately by filling in and seeing if one of them had more than half the board.
I could also have good handicap games with them (good as in evenly-matched), changing number of handicap stones any time someone won twice. At the end of the second ~20min session, the younger one needed 11 stones and the older one 9 stones (still 9x9 of course).
Still pretty raw beginners, making poor/interesting choices for handicap stone placement, but no confusion about counting.
All that to say: area scoring is easy IRL, and we should make it so on OGS, and to me that feels like the top priority for improving scoring for beginners.
Once area scoring is easy and straightforward on OGS, I think the next priority is making it easy/obvious for beginners to get games using those rulesets.
I don’t really have an opinion about whether stone scoring and/or group tax are useful training wheels for beginners, but I think it would be a priority inversion to implement them before doing the above.
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I don’t agree with that claim. At least it doesn’t seem to be a big issue IRL for the kids who I learn how to play in my youth club, or other beginners that learn how to play go in a beginners course here in the Netherlands (and most other countries in Europe, where Japanese rules are still the norm). Understanding territory scoring from an explanation like this tutorial is not too difficult to understand for an average 6 year old (or younger, when taught individually).
But judging from the many scoring questions I see online (particularly on Reddit), I’d agree that territory scoring is apparently confusing for many people who try to learn go by themselves, without any tutoring by an experienced go player.
I’d also disagree with that. I find it hard to follow when someone counts the score IRL under Chinese rules, not in the least because the IRL area scoring process destroys the final position (see this example).
Only when the area scoring uses a territory scoring process with pass stones (like AGA, BGA and FFG rules), I can follow it without any issues.
I agree that my main issue with the IRL Chinese scoring process doesn’t apply to online games, because after removing dead stones, the computer can do the counting quickly without destroying the final position.
With that issue out of the way, and given the apparent confusion that many online self taught go players seem to have about scoring, I agree that for online beginners it’s probably a good idea to offer area scoring by default.
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I agree that using atari go (a.k.a. capture go) as a stepping stone to teach real go is redundant at best, but I know that many go teachers do it, so each their own I guess.
The main issue I foresee is that beginners starting with stone counting on OGS and moving on to area counting might keep filling in their own territories before passing. If they do that under area scoring rules or territory scoring rules, they could get reported for stalling.
To me also it would be just a gimmick. But OGS seems not averse to adding gimmicks (for example Feature Request - Stone Images).
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get reported for stalling
That’s a good point.
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You guys are missing one important point: you teach other people. If those people do not understand something, then you clear it up. This is very important!
However, if you find out about the game from other places it’s more difficult.
I found out about Go when someone mentioned it in the chess subreddit. I started learning the rules and of course I got stumped - I couldn’t fully figure out territory because it depended on “eyes” and even more than that, the “eyes” that I usually made were fake eyes. I eventually figured it out, but it took some time. How many people will spend the time to get over the initial hurdle?
This leads to a frustrating experience because you don’t even know how to score the game which is such a basic thing in other games.
It has to be easy for people that don’t have a teacher.
If we want to increase the number of Go players, then we have to make it easier to score. It’s unfortunate that such an awesome game has a community that tells beginners to “lose 100 games” and then you’ll know how to play. Few people will do that.
The easiest rules that I found are:
- capture rule
- don’t repeat positions
- count stones to find winner
The essence of the game is to have the most uncapturable stones on the board.
1 minute and you’re ready to play a game that will not end too soon (before borders are established) and that can be scored easily.
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I agree that stone counting may be a good idea for the first couple of games of a raw novice (on a small board), at least until they learn (the hard way) about 2 eyes.
I can see stone counting as a stepping stone in a beginner’s course to learn real go. But when it is used outside of a beginner’s course with a teacher to guide them beyond this phase, I’d worry that beginners stay stuck in this when nobody tells them that this scoring method is not used nowadays in actual competition. It may contribute to even more scoring confusion when those self-taught beginners inevitably get exposed to area scoring and/or territory scoring later on.
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stone counting as a stepping stone
Yeah, exactly! At least for 9x9 (or even smaller boards) games it’s also practical - there aren’t so many stones to fill in as compared to 19x19.
After a few games with stone counting, it’s easy to switch to one of the area scoring rules.
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Still I’d expect beginner’s courses that might use stone scoring as a stepping stone, to use physical boards during that phase, not an online platform like OGS.
If it were to be implemented on OGS, I’d expect the stone counting player base on OGS to be quite small, so self-teaching beginners looking to play under stone counting rules would have even greater difficulty to find suitable opponents than they currently have.
To fix that, perhaps the default/available rule sets could depend on a player’s level. Like having only stone scoring available for raw novices, and having area scoring available for players stronger than about 25k, and having territory scoring only available for players stronger than about 15k.
I think you also then have to think about is it actually better to have to teach people more than one ruleset?
If one set of rules is overwhelming or confusing is teaching even more rulesets better?
Is it actually a better teaching tool to have you learn one way that’s supposedly more intuitive only to find out no one plays that way, or scores that way, and then change that when you stop being a “beginner” etc.
I think there’s plusses and minuses to everything.
One other thing we can do is improve the learn to play section of OGS. I think the current section is a bit minimal, but there’s nothing to say you couldn’t add a few short explanations in there, show how to score with territory in additional steps if you want, ask someone to capture dead stones and then explain why they can just be considered dead since they can be captured.
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The player has placed stones themselves might make it easier for 1k who already almost remembers whole game he played and could replay most of moves. For beginner who can’t recall last 3 moves he just played you can place stones on the board or not it will make no difference.
I think I can agree that area scoring and stone counting without a group tax are equally easy to understand for beginners. But I see no evidence that stone counting without a group tax has an advantage over area scoring in terms of ease of understanding.
Just wanted to add my own bit in support.
When I’ll be teaching beginners scoring I’ll teach them area scoring. Firstly, as you’ve said in general territory scoring has too many buts with all those definitions of what’s dead or alive and you can’t simplify your existence just by putting stones inside your own territory. It won’t matter to advanced players, but very crucial for a beginner.
Secondly, every stray dog knows how to count score using territory counting and almost nobody knows how to count final score using area scoring irl. If I can only teach one way of counting(partly not to overwhelm), I think it’s better to teach area scoring. Later beginner can learn territory scoring from basically anyone else he plays with. So beginner will have a choice between two scorings and won’t be restricted to territory counting which has only one advantage is that’s easy to understand how to count final score.
Unrelated, it’s also kind of cool as a beginner to know how to score area while everyone else who’s stronger then you doesn’t.
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I have this Tsumego Dragon on my app. I am using Squishy Go which uses Stone Counting. This is by far the easiest to understand rule set for beginners I have seen. I’ve been teaching Go for 17 years and this is my favorite.
I personally would like this to transition into Chinese rules. I think it is the closest and the most beginner friendly. My reasoning is I hate rule sets that punish beginners for playing in their own area. I actively encourage beginners to play in their area to figure out what happens so they understand it better.
I know @anoek and @GreenAsJade are working on a better beginner experience and the answer is not an easy one. I think this feature could be useful for tutorials and teaching but not beyond that. I really wish the default rule set was Chinese.
It is my hope to create a smooth transition from my app to OGS’s ranked play.
Some may disagree but I personally think all rated game should exclusively use Chinese rules.
1: it is a Chinese game
2: it reduces filters that divides the match making
3: it is the most beginner friendly that I can think of
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Once upon a time we defaulted to AGA rules but we had a lot of push back at the time because Japanese was the default elsewhere.
One thing I’ve considered would be to default to AGA or Chinese for beginners and at some cutoff point switch the default to Japanese for your SDK/Dans, but it seems like a recipe for confusion, so I’m not sure.
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I think AGA is not good because that would be biased to America. Chinese gives the exact same results and is easy to justify that it.
I play on Fox and I don’t feel any different in scoring Japanese or Chinese. I just look for the Komi and play as normal.
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Chinese/AGA rules encourage players to stall by infilling or by hopeless invasions.
I personally believe 99% of people aren’t malicious. This is also why the report button exist. I don’t think a beginner friendly feature should not be used because a few people will abuse it.
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3 consecutive passes makes game get auto scored. If I’m not mistaken.