The Chinese rules are quite clear but suffer from the freedom
that they provide referees in deviating from the rules.
Interesting. So you are saying that sites such as
http://www.britgo.org/rules/compare.html have it wrong? Or that the
They have it wrong in that they describe something the referee may do,
rather then what the rules prescribe.
(I wrote examples in Chapter 3, Section 20 at
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wjh/go/rules/Chinese.html have been removed
from the official rules? Could you point us to a more authoritative
and up-to-date source?
This is apparently all we have to go in in the English language.
Btw, Section 3 is titled "Rules for the Referee". In the absence
of a referee, it would seem sensible to just follow the General Rules
of chapter 1.
IMO chapter 1 one section 6 alone is described too informal to draw
any strong conclusions without taking the full text, including
examples and commentaries into account. (For example, it is not even
Section 6 reads:
Reappearance of the same board position is forbidden throughout the
game.
It takes a stretch of imagination to consider this unclear.