Eye

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  Difficulty: Beginner   Keywords: Life & Death, Go term

Eyes are a central concept in Go, since two eyes guarantee the life of a group and one eye can mean a great advantage in a capturing race.

In general, what Go players call an eye is an empty space surrounded by stones of one colour, the simplest forms of which are the single point eyes.

[Diagram]

Single point eyes

Here are single point eyes in the centre (unmarked), at the side (marked BC) and in the corner (marked BS).

However, larger surrounded spaces can also be called eyes. For these we refer to eyespace, eyes collection and life and death.

For a more thorough explanation of single point eyes, we refer to recognizing an eye. Also, beware of a false eye that may look like an eye.


There is much discussion on the definition of what is an eye and what is not. The discussions of technical algorithmic definitions is meant mainly for mathematicians and computer programmers, for whom absolute precision is needed.


Proto- For such an essential concept in Go, I am surprised that I haven't seen a single Japanese Go term for this. The closest I've come across is dame, but that has other capacities and it seems to me that using that term for eyes bends controversiality so much that it breaks through to just being wrong. I would like to be enlightened as to what the Japanese term would be as well as being directed to somewhere that uses the term that I might have missed.

Hikaru79- It seems to me that dame is completely wrong. It means Neutral Point, not eye at all. Running a 'translate' command on IGS, it returns 'me' as the Japanese term for eye. The Chinese is Yan.

KarlKnechtel: As far as I know, 'me' is correct, as in MeAriMeNashi for example.

SodaClub?: People in my local Go club (Osaka, Japan) use the term 目, read "me". I think it is the official term.


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