Note: I like to research and am interested in Go, rating systems and so on, but am NOT (so far) a Go player, so take my answers below with a grain of salt.
To attempt to answer the question of handicap stones and ratings, I believe that it would be theoretically possible to incorporate handicap stones into a rating system, but likely needlessly complicated for practical purposes. If ratings were combined with handicap stones, ratings would remain nearly unchanged in the event of a close to expected outcome given the handicap - a game won or lost by a few points, but would change if one player performed significantly better or worse than the expected result given the handicap - more of a blowout than expected. I would not (at least initially) attempt to implement ratings in combination with handicap stones, in other words. They can be used for unrated games between widely different rated players to make a game between them more interesting, but calculating how, how much and when to change ratings for handicapped games would be a tough call.
Message was edited by: watsu at Jan 18, 2018 4:01 PM
Retired from TB Pente, but still playing live games & exploring variants like D, poof and boat
First one: is there an upper bound on the total number of captures in a game per player?
So far, I don't have a great answer for you on this question. My best stab at it is that since a few closely contested professional games will last for 400 moves, but most games will last under 400 (or even 200) moves one could likely assume a tentative upper bound of 200, but I would try to incorporate some sort of capture overflow system beyond any reasonably set upper bound, since players here have been known to accidentally crash the system while recreating with possible but unrealistic game scenarios, specifically with continuous simultaneous poof captures.
Retired from TB Pente, but still playing live games & exploring variants like D, poof and boat
Handicaps are for later then, should be a mild adjustment.
The game is over when 2 players pass, but then what? My guess is the flow is as follows: The 1st player to pass gets to mark dead stones, the 2nd player can agree or disagree.
With dead stones marked and territory corrected, a final score is computed and the game decided. But what if the last player to pass does not agree? Game continues?
I think I know how to count, but I'm wondering about the flow.
I can do the counting by doing a flood-fill for each color and discard the areas that can be flooded by both. But, areas without dead stones removed will be discarded, and with dead stones removed would be counted towards someone's territory.
I don't think there's an algorithm to remove the dead stones (other than playing out the game), I thought players have to agree on them.
So my question is, what if they don't agree? Does play resume to settle the dispute?
Okay, I read up a bit more on your question and it seems you are correct that play resumes if there is disagreement on whether or not a stone or stones are dead. There is some discussion of that here: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/84170/removing-dead-stones
Retired from TB Pente, but still playing live games & exploring variants like D, poof and boat
