Jeff Nowakowski wrote:
On Thu, 2008-09-18 at 19:41 -0700, Ross Werner wrote:
The only exception is the "ridiculous invasion"
scenario that started this thread--that's the only case that I have seen
in which the "virtual"ness of the playout matters.
That's a gross simplification and untrue. Consider some dead stones
with a false eye. The player who has dead stones will pass, thinking
his stones are alive. The player forced to kill them will lose points
by removing the false eyes. This is a genuine dispute. Now after the
false eye is removed you have to roll it back, making it "virtual".
This is a good point, and a scenario I hadn't considered. I retract my
previous statement. There are some cases where the "virtual"ness doesn't
matter, and there are some cases where it does matter. The
"PaperTiger-Ronnin" example is a good one.
Consider typical nakade shapes. The beginner will only have a simple
understanding of these, if any. Shapes that look alive will be dead,
and vice versa. You demonstrated this yourself when I showed you one of
my disputed games in our last discussion:
I'm happy to see that my Go playing skills have improved since then. :-)
Hopefully this discussion will be more fruitful for me this time around,
not being 20k any more. (Or perhaps, not being a beginner, I will make
unwarranted assumptions that I would not have made years ago.)
We haven't even discussed ko yet. That's another can of worms.
Indeed, and a nasty one at that.
I have several problems with your rules:
1) They are ad hoc. I am certain that you could not specify them
mechanically. I would love to see you try and program them.
This is an intriguing challenge, and one I would like to take up. Do you
mind if I attack the "single disputed group" case first? I believe I can
generalize to multiple disputed groups programmatically, but I am not
certain of the results.
Here is my first attempt:
1) Assume that after two passes, there is a single group of disputed status.
2) Play continues, in a "virtual" playout, until two consecutive passes
occur.
3) At this point, if the group has been captured, play is rewound to the
original state after #1, and the disputed group is marked dead. If other
groups on the board have been killed or otherwise changed, that does not
affect the game.
4) If the group has not been successfully captured after two consecutive
passes, play is rewound to the original state after #1, and the disputed
group is marked alive. Again, changes to other groups on the board do
not have any affect.
Do you see any mechanical issues with these rules, or do they still seem
ad-hoc? (If you're still interested in seeing an actual program with
this implemented, I'm happy to do so--I just want to make sure there
aren't any glaring holes in my logic that are obvious before I start.)
2) Fuzzy concepts that aren't easily verified by the beginner are
confusing, because they have no concept of what seems obvious to you as
an experienced player. Again I'm talking about the vague descriptions
of your rules.
I agree that fuzzy concepts that aren't easily verified by beginners are
confusing; if I cannot clearly state a mechanical process for resolving
disputes in territory scoring, that definitely makes it inferior to area
scoring.
3) If the dispute phase is impractical to use (requiring remembering the
original position and restoring it -- or not, since you say sometimes
you don't restore it), then the beginner is discouraged from using it.
Compare this with just continuing play and scoring as normal when using
area scoring rules.
When two beginners play each other, in real life (not on a computer),
there is definitely a drawback to having to remember the original
position. However, I believe there are also slight drawbacks to
beginners when using area scoring--and those drawbacks are present in
every game played, whereas the drawbacks of position restoring are only
present in cases of a dispute.
It is, I suppose, a question of tradeoffs--which is a better
general-purpose ruleset? I prefer one, but I can entirely see how you
might prefer another, due to its simplicity in this area. All I hope to
do, however, is to convince that territory scoring is not hopelessly
without a way to resolve questions of this sort. It may be less elegant
than other rulesets, but it is not completely impractical.
That's probably fine to explain the one and simple scenario where a
stone is plunked down in the middle of a clearly uninvadable territory.
That's just enough for an experienced player to get a beginner to nod is
head, "yeah I can see that", and not nearly enough to let a beginner
play on his own with other beginners with a true understanding of the
rules.
I definitely want a ruleset where two beginners can play on their own
without having to appeal to a stronger player to adjudicate. If virtual
playout does not suffice for this, I may be convinced to prefer
explaining pass stones to beginners. At the moment, however, I still
think virtual playout can be rigorously defined and in the vast majority
of cases, successfully applied.
~ Ross
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