In this case there there is not. I repeat, if t1 is white territory t2 cannot be black territory. Are you really trying to suggest otherwise? This is against the rules of Go. Do you want OGS to change from being an online go server to OGBOGBNGBSMPDUSS: an online game-based-on-go-but-not-go-because-so-many-people-don’t-understanding-scoring server?
The official Japanese rules are quite strict as they were formalized for competitive professional games. So a mistake such as passing to early tends to be punished rather severely.
But informal, less strict variants tend to be used in IRL casual amateur games. When a player accidentally passes too early, they may be more forgiving and work it out in a friendly manner.
There is still a gray area in between:
- IRL tournament games, where referees may adhere more strictly to the official Japanese rules for stronger players, while giving more leeway to beginners.
- Online games on a specific server, which would use the same set of procedures and rules for casual novice games as well as official tournament games, including professional games.
So I’m all for a manual scoring tool too, where regions are colored depending on being closed and all opponent stones inside marked dead. It’s really not that difficult when the UI for this is well made. I agree with @uberdude that being able to do this is not asking too much from an aspiring go player. OGS could even provide some marking exercises in their go playing tutorial.
The tricky part is handling situations where players disagree on marking of dead groups. This should rarely happen, except for novice games and trolling players. And OGS needs to handle this in a way that doesn’t punish beginners, but also doesn’t reward trolls.
It seems that the easy solution is just to resume the game, but under territory scoring without pass stones, trolls can then easily trick their opponent into losing points, thus affecting the score in their advantage.
I see 2 decent solutions to this specific situation of an online disagreement under Japanese rules:
- Use pass stones when resuming after a disagreement. This deviates from the Japanese rules, but it would do the job of preserving the score in most cases. Possible exceptions are situations involving ko, such as bent-4-in-the-corner and more esoteric situations.
- Never resume under Japanese rules, even if the players disagree on dead stones. Two passes (or perhaps three, for ko) finish the game. Use KataGo to determine which player is correct in any disagreement and keep the markings that the players did agree on (and score emerging contiguous regions from there). Possibly flag the player who was wrong if they are stronger than DDK, for suspicion of trolling.
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by your logic it should be impossible to mark 2 clear eyes pass alive group as dead.
it is possible now, it has some meaning (sense), its just against the rules
Why do you think that? You have misunderstood me if you think that is an implication of what I have said. In my proposal (which is not anything new or weird, it’s how many go servers do scoring, including KGS and OGS in the past) white or black could click on any of those black stones in top left, and it would toggle the state of the black chain between alive and dead. If in the dead state, then the 2 eyes inside become white territory, exactly like your picture. If black group is marked alive, they are black territory.
And it is possible in my preferred design. Indeed it has some meaning; it is the wrong determination of their status, but it is consistent with the mechanics of scoring. If both players foolishly agree that they are dead, it is not actually against the rules. On the other hand saying the black stone at 1-2 is alive, but the connected black stone at 2-1 is dead is wrong at a fundamental level of the mechanics of the game and stones being connected along the lines.
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ok, it shouldn’t be possible to mark half of united chain of black stones as white and half as black - because it never would be correct
but, it makes sense to paint empty space as one likes
Chineese rules, white passed, black passed
even if white plays E1, black wins
so players may mark it like this:
maybe its against some old rules, but it makes perfect sense
Why did you mark E1 as white?
If this was important, I bet black would challenge that arbitrary marking.
That last picture is what I am against. You are using a score estimator as a scoring tool. They are different. Their conflation online leads to so much beginner confusion. Teaching beginners in real life this problem simply doesn’t arise. You say “maybe it is against some old rules”. I say “it is against all current rules, and inventing new rules to make this valid is introducing bigger problems that the one you are trying to solve”. If you allow that, you also allow saying j3 is black, j4 is white, j5 is black, and d4 is white or other arbitrary patterns. The way to sensibly deal with this situation is:
- resume the game and close the borders.
- if players don’t want to resume, or server prevents it because of e.g a procedure in which AI scores and marks the game and give hints about good moves which means you don’t want to allow resumption, then no one gets any territory. This game ends up with a score result which is different to had the players been sensible and continued the game as competent players. That is acceptable, and better than breaking the rules of Go to avoid it. The beginners then learn a valuable lesson from this one game, and don’t make the same mistake in future. They also don’t complain to a mod who then changes the game result.
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OGS trying to come up with some arbitrary score for unfinished games seems like a bad idea to me. There are just way too many ambiguous edge cases where people would disagree on the color of some specific intersections near a border opening.
And what about less simple cases, such as both players passing in this position?
I think it would be a nightmare to attempt to “fix” players mistakes in a way that both players would fully agree on.
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While I see where you’re coming from, I must admit I’m fundamentally uncomfortable with having contiguous territory belonging to different players.
This is blasphemous and goes against everything that is holly.
Plus at this point, if you’re not going to finish the game anyway you might as well stop halfway and draw the borders yourself. This can spiral pretty far.
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Or neither player plays any moves, both pass, and then white insists being awarded the win because bots favour White with modern komi! “If we continued the game correctly I would have won”.
I am against using a bot or AI to determine the game result (with one possible exception: use a strong AI as an automated referee to settle a stone marking dispute, on the strict condition that the game is not resumed afterwards).
But still, white would indeed win if that is a komi game, because neither player has any closed territory.
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Anyway, my purpose in participating in this discussion was to try to give some informed and useful input from an experienced player, teacher who has successfully made beginners understand how to score (I’ve probably taught 100+ university students, and some kids, I know gennan has taught lots of kids at his school club) and UI designer as part of my day job, who has for a long time seen the confusion OGS causes in r/baduk questions, and more recently in these forums, so that if/when OGS devs come to decide how to improve the scoring phase implementation here we end up with a better solution. But as some of these changes may need only front end and not backend changes maybe my time is better spent just doing them for a pull request rather than trying to convince people allowing different score states in contiguous regions is a bad idea and against the rules of Go!
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I’d like to point out the very large difference between scoring UNCLOSED territory, and using the high level AI to mark closed territory as UNSETTLED or DEAD because the AI sees a sequence that neither player can see.
Use the example of kibitzing. There’s a difference between someone saying ‘hey guys, this is in closed and requires moves to resolve’ and ‘hey white, there’s a problem to solve, right here in this specific area of the board, and you can win! Resume the game!’
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Yeah, but your impression of the need from this comes from seeing how some older algorithms behave. You don’t need the tool for marking individual points if you have a good algorithm.
KGS’s scoring algorithm (which is part of offline CGoban3 as well) is essentially 100% correct in scoring conditional on players correctly marking dead stones and borders being closed, including sekis. Try downloading cgoban3 and playing with the scoring tool and you can get a feel for how it works depending on what you claim for the status of stones. (CGoban 3 Download)
Unlike dead stone marking which is as hard in general as solving arbitrary tsumego and therefore is unboundedly difficult, seki recognition conditional on players marking all stones and completing all borders is doable with perfect accuracy without even AI. So better to just implement the perfectly accurate algorithm rather than introduce a whole new tool for players to learn.
Edit: just for fun, cgoban’s algorithm is known to be incorrect sometimes, the known case where it happens when a particular seki fulfills a extremely stringent condition. Click here to see the simplest example anyone has been able to construct of such a seki.
Summary
wms's Dame-Seki Challenge at Sensei's Library
If this is the simplest known failure case, for all practical purposes, this seems good enough.
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I don’t see what you mean. If you had the scoring tool so that if you click and it toggles the life of stones, and changes from Black to White say… it’s not like you’re introducing a whole new tool to just toggle a single point or stone. For example one could just have it that the user holds shift+clicks instead.
There’s perfectly reasonable situations where you want to unmark a single point, e.g. a point which will have to be filled in anyway once all the dame are filled e.g. stone’s that can be atari-ed or forced to connect back with an atari later. If you’re giving people the chance of opting out of filling dame, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to add such a feature.
Maybe “the algorithm” will do some playouts and figure this out, but at that point you’re also just getting toward an idea of an ai which has to figure out which stones will be captured in order to not mark certain points as territory in Japanese rules.
Also if the premise is
“The goal of the KGS seki detection code is to always correctly spot seki, as long as both a) all dame that can be filled, are filled, and b) all dead stones are marked correctly.”
that’s not really helping the case. Nobody* wants to fill all the dame online. So I would discount the “simplest” counter example comment, unless it genuinely also never mis-recognises a seki from where players typically stop playing.
*(I honestly don’t mind, but many many people don’t fill dame unless it’s AGA or Chinese rules etc)
I guess we’re talking about the score tool and not the score estimator on KGS right? The score estimator is pretty bad with seki.
The scoring tool doesn’t really do a whole lot to be honest. You manually mark things yourself, so it’s hard for it to do something wrong when it’s not really doing anything at all.
I mean if that’s the way it has to be I’m okay with it. It’s the way it is anyway with Pandanet and KGS then it’s something people are used to and can get used to too.
I’m guessing you haven’t played on KGS much? Since the scoring tool handles leaving dame on the board just fine. It even correctly scores a lot of the simplest cases of internal protection being needed (primarily: false eyes that will get fillled and therefore can never provide territory), and doesn’t need any AI or even any playouts - it’s a very well-written deterministic algorithm.
Yes, commonly it misses an internal protection being needed, in which case the players resume the game, one of the players starts filling the dame that begins to make the protection necessary, the other makes the internal protection, and then they go back to scoring.
No need for devs to implement special tools to mark individual points. Again, the mechanism of “resume the game and play a few more stones” is enough.
The reason that “the scoring algorithm works correctly if all the dame are filled” is relevant is because it covers the worst case - this being true is exactly WHY you don’t need any separate tools. Because in the worst case, you resume play and fix the few places involved, and then the score is correct. It would only be if this WASN’T true that you would need a separate tool, because only then would you need to be able to indicate something to the scoring algorithm that even resuming play would not be capable of fixing.
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For now, here’s a tip: always be the one to pass first! Then the AI auto-score will reveal your opponent’s weaknesses instead of your own.
If your opponent passes first you can play a ko threat to win back the right to pass.
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Here is a game where I followed my own advice. Black passed after this move, presumably giving up on the invasion:
I (White) was only ahead by half a point, so under Japanese rules unable to make an additional protective move. I thought the AI scoring tool might call one of my groups dead, so I played this threat:
Then I could safely pass first, avoiding possible AI intervention in our scoring phase.
Now I am a doubting myself, though. Given that I was (and still am!) unsure about the status of the bottom, was it wrong of me to quietly accept the autoscore calling it alive? I would be interested to hear the rules pedants’ opinions here.
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Well, it seems that I’ve been specifically summoned, so I’ll offer my opinion.
First, I’m not certain about the status of the bottom at the end of the game. I think the black invasion is dead, but I’m not 100% sure. So, in the following, I’ll discuss what should happen if the bottom was (hypothetically) unsettled, in addition to what should happen if (hypothetically) it was alive or dead.
Technically, under Japanese rules, this trick of playing a ko threat in order to pass first should not make a difference, because the official Japanese rules states that when resuming, upon the request of one of the players, the first move should be given to the other player. However, OGS does not properly handle this and seems to always give the first move to whoever had passed first, regardless of who requested the resumption. I consider this behavior to be a bug (which I will refer to as the “resumption bug” below).
If an “effective move” (such as an unsettled position that decides the outcome of the game) is discovered during scoring phase, then technically, under the formal application of the Japanese rules, both players should lose. There is no built-in support for such an outcome on OGS, so for these situations, we would typically declare the game a “tie” (if the game has not already finished) and annul the game. However, in practice, I think the majority of such occasions that should be “both players lose” simply go unreported (and not properly addressed) and the players might simply try to score the game somehow, or one player might resume the game in order to take advantage of the resumption bug.
Thus, if the status of the bottom is unsettled, then it should have been “both players lose”. On the other hand, if Black’s stones on the bottom are dead and White is fully alive (regardless of who has the turn to play), then the game is effectively over and was properly scored. If Black’s stones on the bottom were alive, then the game is not quite yet over, and White would be far behind. However, it seems that neither player believed that to be the case, and I don’t think that is either.
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