Re: [gnugo-devel] Dragon safety early in the game

[bump]

Arend wrote:

> This does not look reasonable to me. Hence we have to tune the above
> formula or the computation of the effective size. Another thing to note
> that defending E4 here is mostly interesting because J4 isn't alive yet
> (and it has a reasonable .weakness of 0.78). Maybe a strategic defense of
> a weak dragon could automatically trigger a strategic attack of a
> weak hostile neighbour.

This is potentially a powerful idea! 

The reason is that if a group had *two* weak neighbors the incentive
to expand it would be greater. In other words, GNU Go would tend to
play splitting attacks.

Splitting attack: If the opponent has two weak groups, you expand
your group between them. To make GNU Go understand this would be
excellent. A famous game with splitting attacks:

http://www.cwi.nl/~aeb/go/games/games/Shusaku/Honinbo.Shusaku-Ota.Yuzo-1853-03-07.sgf

By move 38, white has 3 weak groups. Black plays to keep them
separated and eventually one of them must die.

Dan