Unconditional life

  Difficulty: Intermediate   Keywords: Life & Death, Go term

Chinese: 净活 (jing4 huo2)
Japanese: 無条件生き (mujōken iki)
Korean: -

The term unconditional life is ambiguous and has three common usages.

  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. Usually also seki is not meant, but, of course, it may be. This is the common usage in discussions of life and death problems and also occurs in life and death issues in game positions.
  2. Especially in research articles, unconditional life implies the ability to create a two-eye-formation. Seki is not meant.
  3. In some specialised research articles, 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;
  • Alive with points [1] or Independent life for the second sense;
  • Pass-alive or absolute life or invulnerable for the third sense.

More at /Discussion.


[1] Strictly speaking, "alive with points" is still ambiguous, because it is only an accurate description of "unconditional life not including seki" when the ruleset does not grant points for eyes in seki. (This includes certain territory scoring rulesets, such as Japanese Rules).


This is a copy of the living page "Unconditional life" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2012 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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