Daniel Lepage on 16 Jul 2003 23:30:01 -0000


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[spoon-discuss] Re: [Spoon-business] Political Go 


On Wednesday, July 16, 2003, at 01:31  PM, Rob Speer wrote:


I propose a rule:

__Political Go__
{{
There exists a Subgame called Political Go.

The game is played on a 13x13 board, which is initially empty. At any
given time, every position on the board is either empty, or occupied by
a Stone belonging to a certain player. The rows of the game board are
numbered 1 through 13 from bottom to top, and the columns are labeled A
through M from left to right.

Alliances
---------
For the purposes of this rule, a Player is either a Player as defined in 
the rest of the Nomic, or the Admin.

Every Player has a set of Allies, who are other Players.
Anyone who is not an Ally to a given player is considered an Opponent of 
that player.

Alliances are not necessarily transitive. Player A can be allied with
player B, and player B with player C, while player A remains an opponent 
of player C.

Moving
------

A Move consists of doing either or both of the following:
1. Adding a Stone to the board on an empty space.
2. Forming or breaking an Alliance with another Player.

After any Move, some pieces may be Captured (as defined below).
To form an Alliance, both players must publically consent to do so. (The 
first player consenting does not count as a move; the second player
consents by actually forming the Alliance, which counts as a move.) The
two players then add each other to their list of Allies.

Anyone in an Alliance with another player can break the Alliance at any
time. In that case, the two players remove each other from their list of 
Allies.

A player may move at most once per Checkpoint, and may not move if one
of eir Allies has made the most recent move.

Ko
---
Two states of the board are considered "equivalent" if the only
difference between them is that, at any number of given positions, a
stone belonging to one player is replaced by a stone belonging to
another, and those two players are allied.

A player may not make a move that would change the board position so
that it is equivalent to a previous board position.


Including the forming/breaking of alliances?


(This is the political extension of Go's Ko rule. It really does apply
to any previous board position, but since the total number of stones on
the board tends to increase, it is generally not necessary to look back
more than 2 or 4 moves.)

Capturing
---------
The rules for Capturing are applied after each move, from the
perspective of the player who has just moved. There are two Sides: the
Allies of that player, and the Opponents of that player.

A Group of Stones is a set of stones that are connected by being
horizontally or vertically adjacent, which all belong to one Side.

A Group is considered Surrounded if every position that is horizontally
or vertically adjacent to the Group is occupied by a stone belonging to
the other Side. When a Group is Surrounded, all Stones in that Group are 
removed from the board, and become Captured. Groups belonging to
Opponents of the player who moved are removed before Groups belonging to Allies, which may cause the Allied groups to no longer be surrounded, in 
which case they are not removed.
So, if Player A has a stone that is surrounded by two of Player B's stones and two of Player C's stones, then during B's and C's turns, A's stone stays because only half the stones around it are on the other side; but when A's turn ends, eir stone disappears because B and C are both on the other side? Unless e's ringed in B&C's stones, 'cause they're both considered enemies?
And do positions off the edge of the board count as positions? I.e., are pieces on the edge invulnerable, or easily slain?
And if edges aren't positions, i.e., edge groups are easily slain, doesn't that mean that if I control every square but one, and you put a stone in that square, *every single one* of my stones gets nuked?
And because alliances need not be transitive, if B and C ally, and A and B ally, C can lose pieces that are surrounded entirely by B's pieces, but only during A's turn, because B is on the same side of C from B and C's perspectives, but not from A's? 


You may not play a piece in a position where it would be immediately
Captured.

Ending the game
---------------
The game ends when nobody has made a move for more than an Nweek.
Is there any guarantee that this will ever happen? Seems to me that if nothing else, those players who lost lots of pieces can forestall their point loss simply by swapping alliances once an nweek. 


Scoring
-------
(Scoring is the most complex part of Go, and I'm simplifying a bit
here.)

When the game ends, the players should come to a consensus about which
stones on the board could be captured without any Alliances changing.
These stones are removed from the board.
Who the whatnow? You mean, all the stones that are surrounded by enemies from their owner's perspective? or from anyone's perspective? 


A Territory is a set of empty board positions, connected by being
horizontally or vertically adjacent. Any player who has a stone adjacent 
to a Territory at the end of the game is considered to own a share of
that Territory.

If N players own a share of a Territory that contains M empty spaces,
then those players each receive M/N points, rounded down.
Don't the scores rise quite quickly based on the size and shape of the territories? Cause if, say, I have stone in the middle of an otherwise empty 3x3 block, I'm adjacent to 57 territories, by this rule. That's a lotta points. 


Each player also loses a point for each of eir stones that was captured
during the game.
Seems to me that people can keep playing stones until the board fills up. Then scoring kicks in, and nobody gets any points at all. In fact, almost every person who plays this game should come out with few points than they went in with. 


Displaying the Game
-------------------
When a player makes a Move, he does so by posting a message to a Public
Forum describing the move and displaying the state of the game in an
agreed-upon format. Such a message may look like the contents of the
following comment.

[[
I place a stone at G3.

    A B C D E F G H I J K L M
  .---------------------------.
13| . . . . . . . . . . . . . |13
12| . . . . . . . b . . . . . |12
11| . . . . . . . . . . . . . |11
10| . . . . . . . . . . . . . |10
 9| . . . . . . . . . b . . . |9
 8| . . . . . . . . . . . b . |8
 7| S . . . . . . . . . . . . |7
 6| . . . R . . . . . . . . . |6
 5| . . . . . S . . . . . . . |5
 4| . . . . . . . . . . . . . |4
 3| . . . . . . R . . . . . . |3
 2| . . . . . . . . . . . . . |2
 1| . . . . . . R . . . . . . |1
  '---------------------------'
    A B C D E F G H I J K L M

[R] Rob                  0 captures   Allies: S
[b] Bob the Voting Fish  0 captures   Allies: none
[S] Someone Else         0 captures   Allies: R
]]

If a Move as posted is illegal (for example, because it does not take
into account another Move posted just before it), then it is not
considered to occur.
But if it's legal, it happens anyway, even if the newly posted board is wrong? I.e., if I say, "I place a stone at G4", because I don't know that your G3 stone has already been sent to the pf, and so the board state I post is wrong but the move itself was legal, does the move still happen?
Overall, I like the idea, but I definitely think it needs some cleaning up before it'll be playable. And I'm sure I'm not understanding some of it.
BTW, would you mind if I ripped off some of this rule to establish an Othello or Ataxx subgame?
Or perhaps a generalize 'stone-laying subgame' framework ought to be created...? 

--
Wonko

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