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Local tally
    Keywords: Strategy

Local tallies are an accounting device that help to understand the effect of play on sub-boards that is not alternating play. Or, to say it another way, they count tenuki plays, in such a way that, for example, Black's tenuki and White's later tenuki cancel out against each other.

Since the opening few plays of a game usually consists of a number of tenuki plays considered from the point of view of 10x10 corners, 'local tally' is a rather more deeply-rooted idea. If Black makes a corner enclosure with two plays before White intervenes, that counts as tally Black x2, or BB. It may be much later in the game that either player adds to the corner: if there is a sente sequence for Black or for White played out there, the local tally will remain as BB.

That is, both BBWBWBWBWB (means a sequence White then Black, four times, added to a BB position) and BBBWBWBWBWBW reduce to the tally BB for this region of the board. Any sequence of BW or WB leaves the tally unaffected. [1]

On the other hand a gote sequence will change the tally. From BBWBWBW we have White playing in gote against Black's position. In the end the tally reduces to B only. And likewise a black gote sequence here, like BWBWBWB, changes BB into BBB.


The three concepts of local tally, deiri counting and miai counting are interlocking, since the main purpose of the point of view is to understand 'value for money'. See miai counting ratio explanation.

In the background is the temperature concept, since in a real game the 'value of a tenuki play' is what ambient temperature tries to model. Local tally is of most use in epochs of the game when the temperature is fairly much constant: that is, when it isn't so important to count more for an earlier tenuki than for a later one.


[1] This is all watertight mathematics, by the way, as a type of single-entry book-keeping.



This is a copy of the living page "Local tally" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2003 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.