Unconditional life

  Difficulty: Intermediate   Keywords: Life & Death, Go term

The term unconditional life is ambiguous and has two common usages, depending on what is meant by condition

  1. In many articles, unconditional life means simply alive, as opposed to alive or dead, depending on the outcome of a ko. Here, the condition is ko. This is the common usage in discussions of life and death problems and also occurs in life and death issues in game positions.
  2. In other articles and discussions, unconditional life means alive even if the defender continues to pass. This is opposed to alive, unless the defender continues to pass. Here the condition is alternating play. This usage of unconditional life can be helpful for beginners to understand the concept of alive. It is also the common usage in more scientific approaches of life and death issues in game positions, e.g. in articles that lay a base for computer algorithms such as benson's algorithm, but it can be used in ordinary game discussions too.

In order to avoid confusion, it may be advisable to use

alive for the first sense

and

pass-alive for the second sense.

The term pass-alive already features in the [ext] Japanese 2003 Rules.

More at /Discussion


Dieter: WME at 28/11/2003. Previous version: 62. All discussion moved to /Discussion. Created a pass-alive page. I understand that the advocates of the second sense do not necessarily want to talk about Benson's algorithm, so feel free to liberate the second statement from that term.


This is a copy of the living page "Unconditional life" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2005 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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