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

[Rob Speer <rspeer@xxxxxxx>]

Okay. Here's my second try. Now I'm looking back at the old rule and
seeing that it did a bunch of things right.  If nobody finds problems,
I'll actually propose it; I intend for this to be off the forum.

__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.

Each player has a Go Score, which is a quantity of Go Points (possibly
negative), which begins at 0. A player's Go Score may only be changed as
defined in this rule.

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
------

[[Changed from "either or both" to "one"]]
A Move consists of doing one of the following:
1. Adding a Stone to the board on an empty space.
2. Forming or breaking an Alliance with another Player.
3. Passing.

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 Checking Period, 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. Only the positions of pieces
on the board, not the state of alliances, are considered

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

(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 term "dragon", from Joel's rule, is cool. So is his method of
capturing, now that I think about how it works.]]

A Dragon is a set of stones that are connected by being adjacent either
horizontally or vertically, that belong to players who are all
Allied with each other, and that are not adjacent to any other stones
belonging to a mutual ally. [[This ensures that all Dragons are of
maximal size.]] If alliances are not transitive, it is possible for a
stone to be part of more than one Dragon. For example, if A is allied
with B and B is allied with C, then in the formation AAABBCCC, the B
stones are in both the AB dragon and the BC dragon.

A Liberty is an empty square adjacent to a Dragon (possibly on the
interior of it). If a Dragon has no Liberties, then it is Captured.

In the event of a Dragon being Captured, the players having Stones
adjacent to that Dragon are considered the Capturers. The stones in the
Dragon are removed from the board, and the Capturers collectively
receive one Go Point per stone Captured, as follows: as many
Go Points as possible are divided equally among the Capturers, and
remaining Go Points are given to the Capturers with the most stones
adjacent to the Dragon, with ties going to the player who played most
recently. Each player whose Stones are being Captured loses one Go
Point for each stone that e loses.

You may not play a piece in a position where it would be immediately
Captured.
 
Ending the game
---------------
The game ends during a Checkpoint when the most recent move was to Pass,
and nobody has placed a stone for more than an Nweek.

Scoring
-------
[[ Took out the part about dead stones. In real Go, you can use various
methods to tell which stones would be captured if the position were
played out; with the possibility of turns out of order and
back-stabbing, this doesn't work. You have to clear dead stones out of
your territory yourself. ]]

A Territory is a set of empty board positions, connected by being
horizontally or vertically adjacent, and not adjacent to any other empty
positions. [[Again, this makes sure that Territories are maximal.]]
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.

For each Territory, each player adjacent to that Territory receives a
number of Go Points equal to 2*M/N, rounded down, where M is the number
of positions in that Territory, and N is the number of players with
stones adjacent to the Territory.

After the Go Points are totaled, any player with a positive number of Go
Points receives that many actual Nomic points.

The Go game is then reset; the Board is cleared of stones, all Alliances
are broken, and all players' Go Scores return to 0.

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

If a Move as posted is illegal, then it is not
considered to occur. If the state of the game displayed in the message
does not actually reflect the result of making that Move - for example,
because the board does not reflect another Move made just before that -
then the Move is illegal.
}}

-- 
Rob Speer

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