Japanese rules vs. Chinese rules

[Sidney Yuan]

>I read in a french book ('Le go aux sources de l'avenir'), that
> there is a third way to describe the rules of go game.
> I think those rules are the simpliest you can
> reasonably imagine. Here are the rules :
>
>1: Black play first, then white, then black ...
>2: Pass is forbiden.
>3: When at a moment, a group of stones looses his last liberty,
> remain it from the go ban.
>4: It is forbiden to play a move which produces a situation that
> already occured once in the game (Ko rule).
>5: when a player does not have anymore stone on the go ban, he looses
> the game.
>
> THAT'S ALL !! There is not anymore notion of teritory. But in fact,
> the pplayer who has the biggest teritory will win the game,
> because as pass is forbiden, with a big teritory, you are
> able to spend more time playing "stupid moves", like filling
> your own eyes. Soon or late, the player with the smallest
> teritory will have to fill his last eye, and will loose
> all his stones!

It is interesting that so many people are discussing the 'Japanese Rules'
and 'Chinese Rules'. And now there is the 'Third Set of Rules' as
described above. The Chinese have tried them all! The 'Japanese Rules'
were invented by the Chinese who introduced them into Japan during the
Nanbei Dynasty (420-589 AD). Later on, the Chinese realized that the
rules were defective and had started to count stones instead. Unfortunately,
the rules that they came up with were almost the same as the rules described
by the above French guy. This happened around the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644
AD). Since the last two eyes of a group cannot be filled, the side with
more groups is in a disadvantageous position. Instead of filling all the
stones on to the board (which is kind of dumb), the Chinese required the
players to pay a group tax of one stone or 2 vacant points for each group.
These rules lasted until the turn of the century, and finally evolved into the
so-called 'Chinese Rules' of today. For more details, please refer to
the article 'The definition of territory' in the latest Go World.

Sidney Yuan
President
Yutopian Enterprises.
!