Don Dailey wrote:
On Mon, 2008-09-15 at 21:05 -0700, Ross Werner wrote:
Dave Dyer wrote:
Japanese: bad.
I don't think this is the case at all. The Japanese rules
are just a human optimization, to avoid having to make the
last 100 meaningless moves, and still arrive at the correct
score with a minimum of extraneous manipulation.
The tortured details, while not elegant, rarely matter.
Agreed. Japanese may be bad for computers, but I think it's one of the
best rulesets for humans.
It's all a matter of what you are used to. If there were no such thing
as Japanese and it was suddenly introduced today, there would be an
outrage.
I know this is a little late, but I should clarify what I meant: I think
that territory scoring is best for humans. And I think that if there
were only area scoring, and suddenly territory scoring were introduced,
there would be no outrage. However, Japanese rules are much more than
simple territory scoring, and I am not defending or praising those
"tortured details".
Also, I think when teaching beginners Go, the "trust me, you lost here
even though you cannot understand it" approach is a gigantic mistake no
matter which ruleset you are using. Play it out, and show the beginner
exactly why those disputed stones are dead (or alive). This is possible
no matter what kind of scoring you use. If you're using territory
scoring, you will get the exact same (relative) score unless one player
passes multiple times, which shouldn't happen in a play-out with a
beginner who doesn't understand what is going on.
If the beginner does understand what's going on and just wants to know
what's to prevent an obstinate player from insisting that an
obviously-dead stone is alive, then a simple explanation of the virtual
"confirmation" phase should suffice, and a manual "roll-back" to the
original position should be trivial even over a physical Go board.
And, as others have pointed out, "territory scoring" with pass stones is
equivalent to area scoring, so this way you get the best of both worlds!
~ Ross
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