Re: AW: [gnugo-devel] a patch from a newbie :)

[bump]

> I think Dan was talking about the tactical reading code in reading.c
> (atari_atari is the code in combination.c -- it is very good but by far
> not as important as the reading code). You're right that black is
> tactically alive by our definition after D4- D3 because it has five
> liberties. So arend_3_7.2 can do nothing here. (And note that D6 could
> have an aritrary number of outside liberties, so this is really not an
> tactical reading problem.)
> 
> I think it is absolutely correct to address this as an owl problem.
> If we want to do anything useful with connection handling we will have
> to find such a way to value loosing tails.

Possibly the problem should be modified by adding one or more
liberties so that there is definitely no tactical solution.

> One thing that may be worth considering: Your new attack/defense codes
> only make sense for owl results. So maybe we should leave the standard
> attack code as they are and define OWL_WIN etc. separately.

I DON'T like this suggestion as I'll explain.

There's decisions then whether HALFWIN is better or worse than
KO_A (i.e. is killing something unconditionally better than
killing everything with ko). A strictly correct decision seems
not possible but this is likely to be a rare dilemma. So:

#define WIN  5
#define KO_A 4
#define HALFWIN 3
#define HALFLOSS 2
#define KO_B 1
#define LOSE 0

is reasonable.

I also think that WIN should be the same code for the owl code as
for the reading code so if nothing is broke it doesn't matter
if there are some codes that are never realized by the reading code.

Apart from the fact that I think this change is not what we want,
it is also a potential big complication in implementing Nando's
patch.

Dan