[spoon-discuss] Endgame suggestion

[Rob Speer <rspeer@xxxxxxx>]

So, it's come to my attention that the current rules of Political Go
will lead to a long, drawn-out, pointless endgame.

I figured that there was no need to have stones auto-captured at the end
of the game, like they are in Go, because it was simply a time-saving
part of the scoring system. But Political Go doesn't work enough like Go
for this to work.

After there is clearly established territory with boundaries that aren't
going anywhere, someone could decide to be either strategic or an
asshat, depending on how you look at it, and play a stone spang in the
middle of someone else's territory, with 4 liberties.

In ordinary Go, that person just lost a point, because the stone is
assumed to be dead unless it can be made into a live dragon, and dead
dragons in the other player's territory are automatically captured.
If the player does try to make it into a live dragon but fails, the
other player generally expends as many stones to capture it as stones in
the dragon, and the scores come out even.

Political Go has neither the concept of dead dragons nor the
auto-capturing process at the end of the game, so the player could
simply refuse to defend that piece and suffer no ill effects! At that
point the player (or alliance) whose territory it is would have to
surround it with 4 stones.

The scoring system of Go can't be rigorously defined; computers don't
know how to do it, and occasional tournament games end with a panel of
judges coming in to stare at the board for a while, scratching their
heads, declaring the game a draw and going home. This is not especially
desirable for something within Nomic; if the rules aren't rigid, people
will take every opportunity to bend them.

So I'm going to try to make an endgame that approximates what happens in
Go, but is rigorously defined.

This isn't a proposal yet; I'd like people to tell me if there are any
obvious or maybe subtle flaws in it. But it'll be useful to get this in
now, while we still have no idea what's going to happen in the endgame.

The basic change in gameplay is that if you make a dragon with two eyes
(a live dragon), and someone plays inside one of those eyes without
making a live dragon themselves, you can auto-capture them at the end of
the game.  (Nobody has a live dragon right now.)

{{ [[fragment of a proposal]]
__Live and Dead Dragons__

A dragon is considered "live" or "alive" if it meets this condition: if
the stones in the dragon were the only stones on the board, they would
divide the board into at least three disjoint territories. (For most
dragons, one territory will be the large territory outside all the
stones.)

A region occupied by any of those territories but the largest is called
an "eye". Therefore, a live dragon has at least two eyes.

A dragon that is not alive is "dead".

__The Endgame__

Once a player has passed and nobody has made a move for an nweek (or
whatever the condition is in the rule), the Political Go game enters the
Endgame phase. During this phase, no players may place additional stones
on the board or modify their alliances.

If a set of (mutually allied) players control a live dragon, and there
is a dead dragon entirely inside one of its eyes, any of the players
controlling the live dragon may choose to capture the dead dragon. This
capture is performed in the same way as a capture during the game - by
announcing the capture and posting the new state of the board to a
public Forum. A capture of this sort can be made at any time during the
Endgame, regardless of who made the most recent move or what Checking
Period it is.

The endgame lasts for one nweek. After that, the game of Political Go
ends.
}}

-- 
Rob Speer

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