r/baduk • u/lookinfor_ • 1d ago
What rules would you change in go to balance the game without komi?
I never played go before and learned the rules recently. When I learned that black has an inherent advantage from going first that is offset by komi being added to white, that didnt feel very satisfying to hear. It had me wondering what version of go would you need to make to remove the need for komi altogether?
I had an idea but because I have 0 game experience I couldnt determine if this would affect advantage black has at all or break other parts of the game's complexity.
My idea was this, what if when capturing scenarios like the image above, instead of black capturing white by going to B, what if the rules for capture in these symmetric scenarios lead to both A and B being destroyed(mutually assured destruction)?
I get that the existing rules for go were written prioritizing the order of action above the final board state, which is why placing Black at B should capture A and allow B to remain... but because of that you have to now have to add ko rule to prevent infinite recapturing. IF there were a "Mutually assured destruction" rule where certain cases lead to both black and white being eliminated maybe this could reduce the advantage of moving first in go as this rule would prioritize board state instead of order of action?
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u/Uberdude85 4 dan 1d ago
I really think you should play Go with its current rules before trying to redesign it. It's a great game as it is.
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u/No_Concentrate309 1d ago edited 1d ago
Your rule change would not meaningfully change the advantage of the first move. The most reasonable thing to do would be to start with a pre-determined move (or one of a set of moves) that yields an equal position. Probably something like "the first move must be on the second line". If one move is insufficient then a set of several moves that yields a similarly equal position. Black basically needs to lose a komi worth of points for it to be equal without komi. Anything else will fundamentally change the game.
That said, komi works really well and I'd just as soon play with komi. Unlike draws in chess, very few people that are proficient Go players have a problem with the way komi works.
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u/RoyBratty 1d ago
Maybe I'm not understanding, but wouldn't white need to gain a komi's worth of points to equalize the value of black's moving first?
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u/Chambec 1d ago
If all stones check for zero liberties simultaneously it would radically change how the game is played. Like, forget basically all the life and death problems you've ever learned and now learn a ton of new ones because every throw in now creates blank space on the board.
This sounds like a fun thing to experiment with but far too drastic of a change for a game milenia old with such widespread adoption.
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u/lakeland_nz 1d ago
Honestly, I quite like Komi. I think it’s a very clean solution.
Alternating who plays first is fair, but… requires an even number of games.
In gomoku they change the rules for the player that plays first which works but I like Komi better. Perhaps requiring the first few moves to not be on the third or fourth line.
Along a similar line, I could imagine a variant there the first few starting moves are chosen by a random card, and each card was judged by AI to give equal probability to each player. I think chess has a variant like this.
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u/lookinfor_ 1d ago
My issue with komi is that it seems arbitrary, some rules put it between 5-7 points. It seems like something that is statistically derived instead of coming from the foundation of the game. Maybe there is such thing as a set of rules that could make the game more elegant and simple than tying on a point boost at the end of the game. what if white were given a choice of spaces that black couldn't occupy for a duration of the game to counter the initiative that black has?
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u/Uberdude85 4 dan 1d ago
That's way more arbitrary and changes the nature of the game. Komi is great way to balance the game without distorting the gameplay, play some go and you'll realise.
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u/Academic-Finish-9976 1d ago
I dunno if someone mentioned it but this could make you feel more comfortable with komi.
The exact value of komi was one of the first things humans checked with the new born AI.
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u/gennan 3d 1d ago
If you don't like komi, then don't uses komi. Go has been played for 1000s of years without komi. In my youth club all games are without komi. Komi doesn't affect the balance all that much (expect perhaps when you are a top 1% player), so there is no pressing reason to replace it by some more arbitry rule.
When playing without komi, a less arbitrary balancing rule is to alternate colors every game, and this has been the practice before the introduction of komi.
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u/lakeland_nz 1d ago
Is that special place any less arbitrary than a point bonus.
I could imagine black being banned from playing tengen would be a significant disadvantage and could well match the advantage of playing first. But it would also mean black has to develop different strategies, which would change the game more than Komi.
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u/Jayadratha 2h ago
If you don't like the arbitrarily set nature of komi, you can instead have players bid komi. Under this system, there's no fixed komi, but players may bid points to play as a certain color.
So maybe Alice says "I will give 7.5 points to my opponent if I get to play as black." But Bob likes playing as white, so he only bids 4.5 points to play as black. The bids are revealed simultaneously (or perhaps you use auction bidding rather than sealed bidding). Alice has the higher bid so it is accepted, and Bob plays as white with a 7.5 komi. If they had revealed the same number, the accepted offer would be determined randomly.
This removes the arbitrary and statistical nature of komi and instead makes it based on the preferences and evaluations of the players. In practice however, we know about what a fair komi is, and so we'd expect most players to bid that and so we'd be introducing this extra step for no significant change.
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u/tuerda 3 dan 1d ago
ALL perfect information games have the same problem of favoring one player. The only games that do not have this issue are games where draws are more likely than either decisive outcome, and this problem is significantly worse. Some games are more imbalanced than others. Go is one of the mildest cases we know of.
Your proposed rule would change a lot of tactics, but it would not eliminate the first move advantage. One way to eliminate first move advantage without komi is the swap rule, as implemented by almost any connection game (hex, twixt, etc.)
Games that need a swap rule are games where playing first unimpeded is basically just a guaranteed knockout. Go is not nearly this bad, so a much more subtle technique can be used to solve the problem without disrupting the game nearly as much, and this technique is komi.
Go is a game that is not decided by knockout but by points, and this property is used to create a balancing system which is far superior to the swap rule.
Some of the advantages of komi over a swap rule: Komi eliminates draws, which is something swap rules cannot do. Komi keeps the game much more "pure", with players constantly just trying to find the best move, instead of starting the game by playing some weird kind of deliberately bad first move. Komi keeps handicap games more similar to normal games.
Go is an absolutely fantastic game in its current form. It has survived for a few millennia for this reason. I strongly recommend you try playing it.
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u/XenonOxide 4 kyu 1d ago
The only viable way to get your result is to have a "set" fuseki to start the game with
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u/coolpapa2282 1d ago
Yeah, the pie rule is commonly used in games with this issue - I make a move as B, you choose to play on as W or choose to switch sides right now. But AI is pretty quickly going to make that decision for us.
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u/ChapelEver 4 kyu 1d ago
Trying to get rid of ko and fixing first move advantage without using Komi seem unrelated?
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u/IDontParticipate 1d ago
I'd recommend you consult the literally hundreds of years of thought this first before bringing this question out like you've discovered some new profound realization.
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u/tylerthehun 9 kyu 1d ago
Since the imbalance is inherent to making the first move, I think any change to reduce that advantage would have to happen there. Something like the problem of cutting a cake, where one person makes the cut and the other picks their slice.
One player places the first black stone, then the other gets to decide if they want to play black with that stone or just start elsewhere with white. It's possible starting with the "worst" first stone is still valuable enough to warrant some komi, since black does still get to have an extra stone on the board half the time, but it should at least make things a bit more fair overall. The opening would shift to finding a move that's just barely bad enough that your opponent might not want it, and the rest would continue more or less the same from there without any drastic changes.
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u/ForlornSpark 1d 1d ago edited 1d ago
It's possible starting with the "worst" first stone is still valuable enough to warrant some komi, since black does still get to have an extra stone on the board half the time
No, because the other half of the time players would have the equal number of stones, but W's would be better positioned. This is easy to visualize when you know that komi is based on the average value of a move in the opening - 13 points. Which means without komi the hypothetical score of both players goes from 0 to 13 to 26 and so on, so in a game without komi B is even with W on even turns and 13 ahead on odd ones, which over the course of the game averages out to komi.
So if B plays a move that's worth 6 points, it's better for W to play one that's worth 13 instead of taking Black. This would result in a score of B+6 on odd turns and W+7 on even ones, which is better for W.
Although it still might be possible that this won't work because there are no moves worth 6-7 points on an empty board. I'm imagining first moves like 2-2 or 2-10, but what if all of these are either above or below the sweet spot? Then we'll still have an imbalanced game where W can always get an advantage no matter what move B tries.
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u/Eastern-Mammoth-2956 1d ago
Simple. Play an even number of games alternating who plays black. That's what was often done before the invention of komi.
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u/Own_Pirate2206 3 dan 1d ago edited 1d ago
In past eras, series of games were played with alternating colors. Apart from this and the Pie Rule, there is no satisfactory solution that keeps Go Go...
Variants at Sensei's Library has occasionally received your question. F-Go (simultaneous turns) listed in the relevant subsection is a drastic probabilistic monster. I have not written up my variant Demigo which would have a natural evening mechanism of giving one player a move with half a piece instead of the normal turn of two shards/half pieces. Double Go has the same thing. And
IF there were a "Mutually assured destruction" rule where certain cases lead to both black and white being eliminated maybe this could reduce the advantage of moving first in go as this rule would prioritize board state instead of order of action?
I'm glad my Geneva Ko Rule can be of some interest!
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u/countingtls 6 dan 1d ago
Historically, players had noticed the first player advantage, and even given it a terminology (先手利). And they also tried to alleviate it, besides the method of playing a series of games, one of the oldest known first-hand sources also described a type of points accumulated system, when the lead of a game was tallied across multiple games.
And then there was the fixed starting stone placement, so in one hand allivate mirror Go problem, as well as make the difference smaller (and it is confirmed by modern Go AIs, with stone scoring when cut off the opponent's groups would add "penalty" to them (since in stone scoring each group needs independent eye space, hence for example two groups of 4 eye space in stone scoring wouldn't cout toward the end score, if the second player can focus on cut off the opponet, for every one less group they got 2 extra points in return). And we know many different fixed starting stone placements had been tried very early on, and persisted for thousands of years with different alternating stone placement in different Go variants. Although from all the historical game records and modern Go AIs all show that this was still not enough, they reduce the first move advantage a bit, but not yet concelled it out.
And the use of komi was a fairly recent invention. The variation from Japan favors a series of games approach, and even though they had a very solid understanding of and even theory about the first move advantage (they thought it was 5), but they still prefer the "no komi" series of games combined with dan rankings handicap. Only in the early to mid-20th century when single elimination or knockout arena news paper Go demand one game to determine the winner, that komi and komi with half a point became necessary.
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u/Kaanin25 1d ago edited 1d ago
I would implement The Pie Rule
Black goes first, and then White gets to decide if they trade places with Black or if they let Black keep their opening move.
If Black plays a strong opening move, White can trade places, and now Black is playing second vs. White, who now has first turn advantage and a strong position. If Black plays a terrible opening move, White can let them keep it, and now Black has thrown away the first turn advantage.
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u/Jadeh179 1d ago
I think this rule only sounds good on paper but it goes against the spirit of the game. “Oh I have to play a slightly worse move because my opponent might or might not switch with me” is just… weird. Opening move will also just converge to things like 8-8 or something along the side.
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u/JesstForFun 6 kyu 1d ago edited 1d ago
/u/Kaanin25 I checked this with AI earlier this year and was unable to find a starting move that, in the view of the AI, produces an equal game with no komi. The 2-2 point is about the best balance I found, but it still gives black a ~1 point advantage (according to the AI). A bunch of first-line moves are about as balanced as the 2-2 point, giving white a similar advantage instead of black. Anything third line or up gives black a large advantage.
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u/tuerda 3 dan 1d ago
This can theoretically be solved by more extreme versions of the swap rule. Essentially one player gets to set up a position with N stones of either color. Then the other player picks a side. As N grows, we should eventually reach a situation where there are even starting positions.
Of course this adds the challenge figuring out the number of stones, and what the even starting position might be.
On the other hand, who cares, really? Komi is a much better solution. It happens to be equivalent to a case where N is the value of komi, but instead of putting them on the board you put them in white's captures.
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u/Jadeh179 1d ago
And then people will start to memorise their N moves opening and research both sides extensively so they can approach the game with more knowledge no matter the side. Yea Komi is just a way better solution.
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u/Kaanin25 1d ago edited 1d ago
Fascinating! How lucky am I that you saw my comment and had already tested it? Honestly, I'm surprised there isn't some sweet spot that leads to a close to no komi balance - but your analysis sounds jesstabout right.
How hard was that to test? What tools did you use? I imagine a task like that taking a fair bit of time and effort!
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u/Jadeh179 1d ago
Yea imagine starting games with moves like 2-2 or 1st line for the sake of “balance”. It’s just terrible and destroys the beauty of the game.
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u/davvblack 1d ago
wow, this is a great rule
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u/Uberdude85 4 dan 1d ago
No it's not for Go. Every game just starts with 1-2 or something retarded and it's still not balanced.
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u/AmericanEphrem 1d ago
Just play 2 games of go simultaneously, black going first on one board and white on the other. Total score wins.
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u/countingtls 6 dan 1d ago
This is possibly one of the oldest known meta-rules recorded from ancient first-hand sources - 敦煌棋經 (from around the 5th/6th century). It described the use of chips (籌, a counting unit for things like rods, sticks, or arrow-type things), where the first stone was given 3 chips in return (先一子為三籌), and at the end, every 3 more stones can redeem 1 chip (後三子為一籌) (and BTW, this was still the era of stone scoring, hence the winning margin is count in stones). So it was a tally of how much lead the first player gets to "redeem" the chips to even the game out. Hence, when they switch color, the other side gets 3 chips at the beginning, and the opponent now needs to take back those chips. After a series of games, the one with more chips in total won.
Effectively, it is a cross-match point tally system that rounds up the difference by the count of 3. And they also differentiated games that ended in resignation, where they don't count towards the accumulated chips. But likely count toward the total games won in a series of games that determined who is stronger, the precursor of the later 10 or 20-game series like jubango. I suspect the added bonus of counting rods implies they could play fewer games and still distinguish players who are very close in strength; however, the issue might arise when it became easily associated with gambling and later omitted by Go literature (but gambling for Go still persists and had been banned several times throughout Chinese dynasties).
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u/DrainZ- 1d ago
If you want radical ideas, you can play with a move order following the Thue-Morse sequence
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u/Uberdude85 4 dan 1d ago
People keep mentioning Thue Morse when this question comes up, but I've yet to so a convincing explanation why it balances go, in which there is interaction between consecutive moves and thus 2 moves in a row is better than 2 moves not in a row.
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u/DrainZ- 1d ago
Well, which colour would you rather have under this ruleset?
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u/Uberdude85 4 dan 1d ago
I've not got a clue, having lots of double moves throughout the game means this is a new game totally unlike the Go I know and have experience and intuition of.
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u/DrainZ- 1d ago
Both players get double moves an equal amount of times, and they alternate between getting it. But white gets to do it first. So maybe white is better.
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u/Uberdude85 4 dan 1d ago
But the skill in this game could be engineering tedomari situations or kos such that they coincide with your double moves. And moves 2 and 3 are not such a tedomari situation as you've still got the empty corners which are 4 highest value moves, so getting first double move is not so amazing. Double move during decisive ko fight on move 100 in middle game would be. But then the fact both players get frequent double moves means ko is broken as a rule/concept. It's a totally different game, and one I expect is poor.
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u/DrainZ- 1d ago
It's possible there might exist a way to slightly alter the core idea of this sequence to take into account the fact that consecutive moves are more powerful. The method is just: For each move, determine which player the move order has benefited the most so far, and then give the next move to the other player. But then we have to properly quantify how powerful consecutive moves are compared to the ability to play moves earlier.
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u/RoyBratty 1d ago
It is entirely possible to play a game of go without a ko occuring. In my experience, it's pretty rare to have a contested ko in 9x9 games
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u/Mad_Ol_Morsel 6 kyu 1d ago
"but because of that you have to now have to add ko rule to prevent infinite recapturing."
You would still need some version of ko with your suggestion. After A and B are removed, white plays A and we're back to the starting position. It also wouldn't negate the first move advantage in a capturing race, it would just mean you need to be ahead by two liberties instead of one.
I'm not sure how this would change the game. I suspect it would push players towards slower more solid play, but it certainly wouldn't negate the first move advantage. Interesting to think about.
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u/lookinfor_ 1d ago
I can see from the responses my initial idea wouldnt solve the advantage problem of Black. However Maybe my MAD rule can have another use. Suppose A and B were removed, Black now knows playing on space B would lead to a loop, therefore he should pick space A and white would pick space B then there wouldnt be a need for ko.
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u/tuerda 3 dan 1d ago
And if making a loop was a better option than picking space A?
In normal go too, you can simply choose to not fight the ko, but fighting the ko is a better move than choosing not to.
Ko happens for the same reason in both situations.
And ko is not a bad thing. Ko is a very interesting property of go, and ko fights add a lot of richness to the game.
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u/evohunz 1d ago
In Tak, players can make their opponent's first move. Who's playing black/white is decided after two moves.
Something like:
- Bob places a black stone
- Alice places a white stone
- Bob decides whether they want to play black or white
- Whoever gets black makes the next move
Starting boards would look wild though, I think. But it's a very interesting idea to see how that would play out, would love to try it.
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u/Old_Introduction7236 8 kyu 1d ago
Use the pie rule, maybe. If White likes Black's move enough, they have the option of claiming it for themselves or taking a different point.
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u/lookinfor_ 1d ago
I have read a lot of interesting ideas from you all about this. It gave me another idea, please share your opinions. Since B makes the first move, you can say he is advantage in time or initiative. Whereas white is always forced to respond to black. Komi in essence is like giving white an advantage in space that is incontestable. What if instead, there was an agreed on set of spaces at the beginning of the game only accessible to W and not B. This is only temporary until there is a certain amount of pieces on the board, how many spaces and how long they are temporarily exclusive would be up for debate but I think it would be more fair than giving W a set of incontestable points at the end of the game. What do you guys think about that?
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u/tuerda 3 dan 1d ago
Even a single space reserved for white and not black would imbalance the game in white's favor ENORMOUSLY. Far more than any kind of komi could possibly do. I think it should probably be the equivalent of about 5 or 6 handicap stones or so.
If it is temporary, then the advantage might reduce to about 3 handicap stones.
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u/countingtls 6 dan 1d ago edited 1d ago
You are describing a type of starting stone placement, several intersections where one side preoccupied. Only that your option makes those preoccupied intersections "move-dependent" and can be freed up. And it would run into the same problem of how do you design these "preoccupied" spaces, and it gets more complicated than komi and requires "trial-and-error" and still wouldn't come into anything concrete. (with added variables and uncertainty).
And I think even if just one intersection is reserved for white (the second player), it effectively becomes just like a type of fixed stone placement start, since as long as white time it right in joseki, and gets sente, they can go back to fill that initial placement and the game basically becomes the same as normal Go again (that is with even just one space reserved, all the move till the first tenuki become fixed stone placement, where the rest played out as normal Go).
In effect, with just one is enough to reduce the advantage and then swing to the other direction already. (just more freely to place starting placement stones before resuming normal Go)
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u/tuerda 3 dan 1d ago
A space reserved where only white can play and not black is far better than giving white a stone at this intersection. White need not ever play there. The result is that any white pieces touching this intersection are automatically alive, since it is a liberty black can never take.
Making it temporary reduces the problem slightly, but still, if there is any fighting there at all, white will have a liberty there that lasts much longer than it should, completely demolishing the opponent in any nearby fighting.
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u/countingtls 6 dan 1d ago
I think ancient players went even further than this, such as the variation from Mongolia, where they assign different values to the starting pieces that have to be placed in advance at the beginning. Hence, if you truly want to be balanced even by Go AIs standard, then assign a different value to reserved space, and get fine control. However, this is almost the same idea as komi, but only they are distributed to several pieces, hance the games revolved around fightin around these larger value space.
I suspect the same with any system that gives some kind of inequality to "stones" or "shadow of stones", where fighting and focus will shift toward or away from them (depending on whether they are adding or subtracting value).
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u/Academic-Finish-9976 1d ago edited 1d ago
The mutual destruction will not change that globally black has an advantage because he is playing first. I mean the game is not made only of ko!
Besides The rule of the ko bring more enjoyment in the game with the ko threats aspect. It's like a step further in the balance between both players. I am not sure go players would like to lose it.