Balancing Redstone

[Mark Steere]

Redstone is a Go variant in which neutral, permanent, red stones are
used to capture. Redstone is a game of annihilation, not scoring.
One other difference from Go is the suicide rule. Groups of both
colors are removed - not just enemy groups. This creates richer life
and death play.

Redstone rule sheet:
http://www.marksteeregames.com/Redstone_rules.pdf

Redstone has been described by experienced Go players as possibly
"deeper" than Go. The general consensus is that Redstone is the "only
decent Go variant" in existence.

Komi can't be used in Redstone since there's no score. The pie rule
is used instead, the theory being that, with the vast multitude of
available opening moves, there should be one that's worth pretty close
to a half move. What does that mean? In perfect play it wouldn't
make sense. Every opening move would be valued at either zero or
one.

In sufficiently imperfect play (among experts), the notion of a move
valued at half a move would make sense. How would you measure the
deviance from perfection? One crude technique would be to solve Go on
a tiny board and identify which moves are perfect and which are not.
Not real helpful, but otherwise I have no idea.

Which move or moves on a 19x19 would be equitable? Player 2 would
have the advantage using pie, but with sufficiently imperfect play,
said advantage would be insignificant.

With all the claims of Go's "astronomical" (etc.) game tree, I imagine
the most expert play to be pretty fucking far from perfect, but that's
just the intuition of a non-Go player. Not worth a heck of a lot.

It's all academic at this point. Stats from a Redstone server would
help, if one existed. Three different programmers have hinted at
creating one, but the months are ticking by and it has yet to
materialize. Part of the hesitation is the belief that Go players are
too snotty to play Go variants. I don't believe that. It's just
that, prior to Redstone, no Go variants were worthwhile.

If anyone has any ideas for balancing Redstone, instead of or in
addition to pie, I'd be interested in hearing it.

This forum seems underutilized. It's unmoderated. There are no
officious, self-important, overzealous assistant moderators jumping in
and locking the thread because "it's been only going off topic," as
recently happened in LifeIn19.

On another note, I don't have real high hopes for Kaya.gs. More on
that later.