These sort of large-scale capturing races do arise in real human-human games. More so in games between beginners, but possible between more advanced players as well. The capturing race itself is not a “bizarre” thing. Of course it is not normal in a human-human game for a player to give away lots of points elsewhere on the board in order to set up such a capture race, since a reasonably good human player will be able to easily defend the targeted group before it’s too late.
Qualifications: I’m somewhere around a 3 dan amateur Go player.
In the paper, David Wu hypothesized one other ingredient: the stones involved have to form a circle rather than a tree (that is, excluding races that involve the edge of the board). I don’t think I buy his proposed mechanism but it does seem to be true that the bait group has to be floating in order for the exploit to work.
These sort of large-scale capturing races do arise in real human-human games. More so in games between beginners, but possible between more advanced players as well. The capturing race itself is not a “bizarre” thing. Of course it is not normal in a human-human game for a player to give away lots of points elsewhere on the board in order to set up such a capture race, since a reasonably good human player will be able to easily defend the targeted group before it’s too late.
Qualifications: I’m somewhere around a 3 dan amateur Go player.
In the paper, David Wu hypothesized one other ingredient: the stones involved have to form a circle rather than a tree (that is, excluding races that involve the edge of the board). I don’t think I buy his proposed mechanism but it does seem to be true that the bait group has to be floating in order for the exploit to work.