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JapaneseCountingE...
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Japanese Counting
    Keywords: Rules

Japanese counting is used for rules that define Scoring by Territory. As a reminder, in Territory scoring, your score is:

  • the number of empty points your stones surround
  • the number of your opponent's stones you've captured (both during the game, and dead stones on the board at the end)

Determining the score:

1: Note Black's and White's territories: They are the empty points surrounded entirely by live stones. You and your opponent should agree on what is alive and what is dead by the end of the game.

Note: This is wrong and confusing. There could also be scoring points that are not surrounded entirely by live stones because there may be connected parts consisting of empty points and dead stones. At the moment counting starts it is already clear WHAT is scored. So you and your opponent do not agree any longer; you would have determined the scoring intersections before starting counting. Whether such determination is merely an application of the rules or whether it is an agreement, this depends on the ruleset in use. -- RobertJasiek, who stops reading at the first wrong point

2: Remove all your dead stones left on the board. These are placed with the other captured stones, black with black, white with white.

3: Take the prisoners and fill them into the territories of the same color: Put the black prisoner stones into black areas. Do the same with the white prisoner stones. If there are any remaining prisoner stones, hold them aside for now.

4: The empty territories may now be rearranged into easy to count rectangular shapes. Stones of one color may be moved from one territory to another of the same color in order to make one territory a few empty points bigger and the other the same amount smaller. This is done to make the areas rectangular and/or multiples of ten or five in size.

5: For each color, add the size of each empty territory together. If there were any left over prisoners of the other color, add them in too. This determines each side's score.

6: If there is Komi, add it to White's score.

Determining the Result

The winner is the player with the higher score. The difference between the winner's score and the losers is how much the winner won by.

There is a Japanese Counting Example with step-by-step diagrams.


Note: This method, in most games, actually computes a players score as their surrounded empty area minus the prisoners of their own color. This is not quite the same number as Territory rules define as the score. However, the winner, and the difference between the scores remains the same.



This is a copy of the living page "Japanese Counting" at Sensei's Library.
(C) the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.