I personally feel that situational superko is more elegant even though I use PSK in CGOS. I did that mainly to be more compatible with KGS rules and Tromp/Taylor rules.
I don't believe my arguments against it make much different in practice and I'm a practical person but ... Here is why I personally prefer situational superko. If you play a game of go, it almost always matters who's turn to move it is. If it's my turn to move it's a different position than if it's your turn to move, even if the stones are sitting in the same exact location. Positional superko seems illogical to me for that reason. Take 2 DIFFERENT positions and arbitrarily forbid one of the players for getting into one of these "different" positions. It feels like an illogical ugly hack to me and I don't consider it elegant for that reason. I don't complain about it too much because like any rule, if it applies to both sides it's fair enough - as long as both sides understand. I don't buy the argument that it's elegant because it depends only what one can see on the board because it requires what has already happened too. You cannot look at just the board and say this is a superko without knowing what has already happened. So you need more information that is just sitting in front of you. There is no superiority here. I also don't think you can say it's elegant because it depends on only 1 type of information. If it's not logical it's not elegant. We could also just consider the 4 corner squares and call it elegant based on economy of information, but it would be a pretty useless superko rule. For the same reason needing a minimal number of conditions is not elegant if it's contrived and arbitrary. So it comes down to if it really makes some kind of sense - and that is something I know much less about. From my point of view it seems like an approximation of something, not truth and beauty but an imperfect shortcut. That is the opposite of elegant to me. But I have heard arguments that NO superko rule quite does the job, they all apparently have their ugly corner cases. So as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't really matter that much, otherwise I would have used situational superko. - Don On Tue, 2009-04-14 at 17:51 +0200, Robert Jasiek wrote: > Richard Brown wrote: > > Positional superko, IMHO, has no such elegant rationale. > > It is a ko rule that depends on only what one can see on the board. > Elegant. > > It is a ko rule that depends on one type of information only: The colour > of each intersection. > Elegant. > > It is the superko rule that has the minimal number of conditions. > Elegant. >
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