You heard me well I think, so once again I point out the fact that proning resignation in a case where the motive is not losing is against OGS policy. I don’t point on your consideration on outsourcing because that’s just inherent in any go games.
I mean go is communication, what your opponent play is going to inspire your own choices. It’s not a monologue.
Since those are my games, it is obvious that in the parenthesis is my main motivation for it and I have to make no guesses or assumptions on that.
If I cannot win, then I can resign and not waste the opponent’s time, let’s not debate things that are obvious. This is why resignations exist, as a game mechanic.
If I want to try stuff and have fun without the burden of the outcome, then I play unranked and thus there are not as many reasons to resign from that game because the result is not the focus of the game.
If everyone was to consent in this case, they’d probably cut out the middleman and the other two players would start a direct game of their own.
that is not the least bit reflective of What I just said. I had more in mind something like, “ you appear to be Mirroring my every move. Why are you doing that?”
I get this more as “I don’t like mirror” but that shouldn’t still be a reason to resign. Furthermore I’m most annoyed by a few players who have a very uncommon style full of traps, bad shapes and multiple overplays. Happens and in some way friends will tell me to avoid this kind of games. Anyway if you don’t have to play them often, it’s just a short bad experience.
If we set aside other rules consideration (I guess this could be considered cheating within OGS rules?), I wouldn’t mind facing such player for the simple reason that I wouldn’t be aware of it.
The result from my perspective would be identical as having played a normal game against the other player in the second game.
I haven’t read all of the thread yet, but what about the following counter strategy to mirror go:
Suppose that I first play mirror go against KataGo, and since KataGo is good at countering mirror go, I would lose both games, but KataGo makes virtually no mistakes, so it’s very hard for the mirroring player to find the move to stop mirroring without making a mistake.
I then memorise both games so that I can replay them leisurely whenever I want.
Next mirror opponent I encounter, I simply play according to the memorised game.
I’d argue that this is a fair strategy. It’s not abusing AI (although from my moves alone it’s not distinguishable from AI), just like how playing a joseki you memorised is not abusing a joseki dictionary.
I guess the only downside is that, although technically a position might be superior according to KataGo, it might not be the case that I as a human can take advantage of that, and might even be more likely to make mistakes than if had come up with my own moves on the spot.
The benefit is that you don’t have to worry about your moves during the mirroring anymore, so the main annoyance of mirror go is gone, and you give your opponent the hardest game they could expect.
The policy concerns resigning a won game for the purpose of sandbagging, not resigning early in the game when there is no decisive win. Resignations would also be prohibited if a person was a troll (a variation of a timeout troll) who started and resigned games for the purpose of wasting time. Neither of these situations is relevant to this discussion.
Every day, people resign games very early for a host of reasons that everyone here can well imagine without my belaboring the point. The reasons can be boiled down to one. They don’t feel like playing the game because they think they won’t enjoy it—same as the case in mirror go.
I’ve tried mirroring against KataGo, I wouldn’t want to memorize that game, it means memorizing very sophisticated variations.
Another downside is that you have to do that for every opening in your repertoire. You can’t start with 3-4 as black, when you’ve only memorized the 4-4 mirror game.