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SizeAndSafetyOfTe...
AStaticTreatiseOn...
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Local tally
    Keywords: Strategy, Theory

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. [2]


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.

kokiri: A question - to my understanding this seems to rely on the idea that the moves are in some way commutative - i.e. BBBWW is equivalent to BWBWB. Is this true, as it seems a bit of a sketchy proposition to my mind? Or is there an implication that if BBBWW can't equate to BWBWB somehow, then white shouldn't have bothered playing in that area (twice)?

Charles The idea here is to evaluate the result in one part of the board (not how you got there) in terms of each players' investment of stones there. When is this a sensible or even useful thing to do? It is plausible in cases where the background on the rest of the board promises 'plenty of big points left' (so the ambient temperature stays pretty well constant), and also the players are jumping about a fair amount rather than settling local fights and only then moving on. For example, a well-played ko fight in the middle game, which isn't game-deciding in itself. Perhaps you can say that in such situations you have to use local tally, to get a grip on a rather fluid 'market' of things to do on the board.

[2] Doesn't this whole section just boil down to: "Local Tally is the difference between B and W moves on a sub-board." Or what am I missing here? -- Sebastian

Yes, you could say it does. Charles

Well, you might wish to start with a position that had unequal numbers, and then play from there, for example in a yose problem. Then the local tally would normally refer only to plays after the starting position. -- Evand



This is a copy of the living page "Local tally" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2004 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.