Hehe next exercice for beginners in view, to practice seki. Surely you get more groups if a group is a alived connected chain of stones. If’s like two groups for the prize of one, although a seki takes a bit more place to work.
So here on 9x9
Group tax is an artifact of the stone scoring rules, which were probably the original rules of Go, later emulated by area and territory scoring.
In area scoring, your points are your area (ie. including the walls).
In territory scoring, your points are you territory (in. what is within the walls) plus the prisoners you’ve captured.
In stone scoring, though, your score is the maximum number of stones that you could theoretically place on the board.
It was considered that a player could not add so many stones in the “theoretical post-game placement” that they would fill in their own eyes, since that would kill their group.
Thus, every group required two moku for its eyes, which were spots where a stone could not be placed and thus a point couldn’t be scored. As such, a “group tax” of two points per group emerged from this premise.
In Japan, stone scoring was replaced by territory scoring.
In China, it was replaced by area scoring.
Without stone scoring there’s no emergence of group tax.
If your question is why stone scoring was abandoned, I’d suggest that in China it was the effect of contact with the Japanese in the early 20th century, and the move away from the cross-hoshi fixed opening.
Why, and even when, the Japanese adopted territory scoring is something probably lost to time.
OGS Honinbo 2008 (Main Class), Round 3 Group 1 is a game I won with 7 separately alive groups. I actually won that game in endgame, which is unusual for the player with many groups as generally the opponent will get to bully them into small life whilst making nice yose. Shows the importance of yose.
Btw, how are people posting board images: is it simply taking a screenshot, cropping and then uploading image, or is there a more direct way?