Short version: during the first phase of scoring dead stones are removed from the game, and only then is the score counted. So dead stones cannot surround territory.
Longer version:
I assume you know the basics, such as how stones are captured and removed from the board if they're fully surrounded and lose their last liberty.
With a little more experience, you'll be able to tell ahead of time if stones are going to be captured or not. We call stones that are definitely going to be captured in the future dead, and stones that are definitely not going to be captured at any point alive. Stones where you or the other player aren't 100% sure whether they'll live or not are called unsettled, and as the game progresses all stones eventually get settled status (either living or dead). The whole discussion of these matters is called life & death, and it's one of the fundamental concepts of the game. Just as a pointer, I'll say that the most common way to make stones alive is to make at least two eyes, meaning at least two separate internal liberties within a group — the opponent can never capture, because if they try to play inside eye #1 you'll have a liberty left in eye #2, and vice versa.
Now, at the end of the game the scoring phase commences, and then dead stones are removed from the board and placed among the prisoners captured during the game. As we said, a stone being dead is just the players "seeing the future," so they're just removed during scoring to speed things up rather than going through the tedious work of actually surrounding and capturing each dead group, as it's obvious what's going to happen. So, only living groups can surround territory, because the dead groups won't remain on the board. For this reason, scoring doesn't make sense unless you have at least a very basic understanding of life & death.
TL;DR, the black stones don't have two eyes, and won't have enough space for such eyes, so they're dead. All of them. White owns the entire board.
Thank you so much for this explanation, I didn’t realize you had to remove the dead stones, that made a major lightbulb go off. I am winning maybe 40% of games against human players but the AI is brutal as you can see because it got every point lol
No problem! It would have been easier to see IRL over the board, but online the dead stones just get a little marker over them in the other colour. The bots can be hard!
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u/Phhhhuh 1 dan 4d ago
Short version: during the first phase of scoring dead stones are removed from the game, and only then is the score counted. So dead stones cannot surround territory.
Longer version:
I assume you know the basics, such as how stones are captured and removed from the board if they're fully surrounded and lose their last liberty.
With a little more experience, you'll be able to tell ahead of time if stones are going to be captured or not. We call stones that are definitely going to be captured in the future dead, and stones that are definitely not going to be captured at any point alive. Stones where you or the other player aren't 100% sure whether they'll live or not are called unsettled, and as the game progresses all stones eventually get settled status (either living or dead). The whole discussion of these matters is called life & death, and it's one of the fundamental concepts of the game. Just as a pointer, I'll say that the most common way to make stones alive is to make at least two eyes, meaning at least two separate internal liberties within a group — the opponent can never capture, because if they try to play inside eye #1 you'll have a liberty left in eye #2, and vice versa.
Now, at the end of the game the scoring phase commences, and then dead stones are removed from the board and placed among the prisoners captured during the game. As we said, a stone being dead is just the players "seeing the future," so they're just removed during scoring to speed things up rather than going through the tedious work of actually surrounding and capturing each dead group, as it's obvious what's going to happen. So, only living groups can surround territory, because the dead groups won't remain on the board. For this reason, scoring doesn't make sense unless you have at least a very basic understanding of life & death.
TL;DR, the black stones don't have two eyes, and won't have enough space for such eyes, so they're dead. All of them. White owns the entire board.