[gnugo-devel] miscellanous items re gnugo

[Michael Olds]

Hello,

I am guessing that you have seen the game attached before, but just in case!
I am a very weak player (used to play some 40 years ago, just took it up
again), but I lost in this game by only the komi (I am interested in playing
by the old Chinese rules requiring open eyes and counting placed stones as
territory; so actually I either tied or won this game) playing black with no
handicap with the program pumped up to the maximum. Black plays the first
stone on the center star and exactly mirrors white (i.e., the computer is
playing itself).

I figured this out while trying to figure out how the program was
"thinking". It looked to me as though there was no 'strategy', only
recognition of situations and knowledge of how to handle them. I asked
myself how would one use strategy against an opponent that had no strategy.

OK. Then I have an idea just to toss into the programming pool: How about
assigning each stone 100% it's own color, with each intersection step away
from the stone reducing that color by increments of 5%. Then for each move
the computer calculates the position that would generate the maximum (over
the entire board, calculating the total color value of the combined stones
of each color) white (or black). The resulting information as to the
position(s) that would produce the maximum benefit could be used to evaluate
moves generated by the program (closest move to maximum white is the move to
make).

This leads me to think that perhaps a layered-module approach to the program
might be worth thinking about: build in the ability to use (add-on) layers
of strategy.

I would like to see the ability to play out the game to the last stone so
that I could play the old Chinese rules properly. Also I would like to see a
fill-in scoring method for those rules.

All that aside, this is a very nice program and is teaching me humility as I
cannot even beat it at the lowest level (not using handicap, not from
arrogance, but because there is no 'boredom for white' in the program, and
handicap stones hinder my view of the roll-out of strategy).

Take Care!
Michael Olds

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