Life and death

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages) This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Life and death" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (September 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please help improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (February 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Part of a series on
Go
Game specifics
Rules Handicaps professional Proverbs List of terms Strategy and tactics Opening (theory; strategy) Fuseki (whole-board openings) Jōseki (corner-based openings) Life and death Tsumego (Go puzzles)
History and culture
History Equipment Variants Four go houses List of games
Players and organizations
Players European Female Ranks and ratings Professionals Organizations Competitions
Computers and mathematics
Go and mathematics Computer Go Go software Internet Go servers AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol
v t e

Life and death (死活) is a fundamental concept in the game of Go, where the status of a specific group of stones is determined as either being "alive", where they may remain on the board indefinitely, or "dead", where the group will be "captured" and removed from the board. The basic idea can be summarized by:

A group must have a means to evade capture -- forever -- by having at least two liberties that can't be filled at the same time (by having at least two "eyes") to sustain itself.