Topological Life

    Keywords: Theory, Go term

[ext] Howard A. Landman, in his paper [ext] Eyespace Values in Go, in Games of No Chance[1], defines topological life as follows:

A group is said to be topologically alive if (1) the units[2] of the group completely surround two or more single-point eyes, and (2) each unit of the group is adjacent to at least two of those eyes.

This is clearly a sufficient but not a necessary condition for the group to be pass-alive which, as is evident from Benson's Theorem, is possible with larger eyes possibly containing enemy stones.

While Landman remarks that it is probably provable that any pass-alive group can be made topologically alive, he does not appear to use the concept of topological life in any significant way in the above paper.

See also

Notes

[1] [ext] Games of No Chance, Volume 29 of the MSRI [ext] Book Series

[2] Landman uses the term unit for a chain, i.e. a maximal strictly connected set of stones.


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