When is 3-3 alive?

[Feijoa]

@bugcat

You might also be interested in my recent thread about the 3-3 invasion beneath the “cloud shimari” or 5-4 + 5-3 enclosure.

I gave this one a try and found that I had to expand the playing field to a 12x12 corner for there to be any significant chance of life, but KataGo thinks White is likely to win:

big corner

I think this is about as big as I can go without messing with komi. No idea if it means anything.

@gennan

how can KataGo be tricked into solving tsumego problems?

It seems like AI is happy to solve “black to live” or “white to kill” tsumego in this configuration. For example, here’s what it thinks of Cho Chikun Intermediate #41:

spoiler alert

(Is that a hard one? It’s available as #42 here.)

@gennan

None of the joseki in the Joseki Dictionary will make sense in a “wall” position. A wall like that is a game changer.

And here Black only needs the tiniest territory to win. I don’t think this would be a good way to evaluate whether a particular opening slightly favors white or black.

@shinuito

The thick wall invasions (lets say) just allow the attacker to play more aggressively than normal, which they could still do on a normal board without the wall up to a point.

If black can survive at all under the aggressive attacks, it seems like that means he’s probably going to live on an empty board and in many other situations. I would like to have a collection of such strong positions involving the 3-3 point to study for use in games!

Some real game relevance (from this 11x11 game!):

I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking, but I suppose that somehow I considered my two 3-3 stones to be strong, A to be a safe way to claim another corner, and B to be a hopeless invasion. So I played at A and gave up on B.