4.1 Features of Area Rules III

At the end of the preceding section we noted that area rules I and II are the simplest theoretically, and they are logically complete, but they suffer from a reinforcement problem: when there are an even number of neutral points a player can reinforce an uncertain position blindly without losing anything, which makes the game less interesting. It was also stated that this problem can be solved by deducting half a point from Black's score and adding half a point to White's score when Black makes the last competitive move. If we add this rule of half a point for the last competitive move to area rules II, we will have area rules III. These rules will be a rather significant advance in area rules because they will make the game more interesting in practice. If we can only give a complete definition of the last competitive move, we can claim to have a set of rules that is optimal in both theory and practice.