Re: [gnugo-devel] working on gnugo

[Gunnar Farneback]

Evan wrote:
> I'm an aspiring developer, and I thought I might try coding a little bit
> for gnugo.  It looks from the todo list like it would be helpful if I
> wrote code that noticed abrupt changes from alive to dead and saved the
> game as an sgf file.  It sounds like this would would be a relatively
> simple way to start working on the project.  So I thought I'd ask if
> anyone was already doing this, and if there are people who would be
> willing to look at patches from a relatively inexperienced coder.

Noone is doing this yet, or at least noone has informed us about it.

Reviewing patches is standard practice, so no problem there. The
response may be a little slow at this time of the year though, since
some people are out travelling (I'm off later today).

Regarding implementation this functionality is not needed in the
engine proper, so to save complexity there it would be better to do
this as an auxiliary program. A good approach would probably be to use
GTP mode to play through a game and query dragon status for each move.
Please ask if it is unclear to you how to do that.

You probably want to join the mailing list. As you may have seen in
the TODO file we ask contributors to assign copyright to FSF. I leave
the details of this to Dan.

/Gunnar