Re: [gnugo-devel] Contributing to GNU Go

[bump]

Wayne Iba wrote:

> Actually, my first question regards attributions on your development page.  I
> am Wayne Iba who modified the original GNU Go 1.1 as found in the original
> post back in 89.  Perhaps you have a certain requirement to be mentioned in
> the author section -- I was just curious.

You are now added to Authors. It may take some hours for the web
page update to take effect.

None of the original authors (which I think is just you and Man Lung Li)
are currently active. So we'd be interested in hearing any early history
of the program. I gather there was an article in Byte magazine that was
influential ... what did you do?

Current GNU Go is very different from the original one but some
of the current code are descended from the original program. The
original pattern matcher, and some of the board code, started
with the original program. There is still a function called
countlib(), for example. But everything has been rewritten many
times.

> Anyway, the real reason I'm writing is that I am teaching CS and
> have 10-12 students who will be working on a project for the
> Fall semester.  I would love to have them work on GNU Go if we
> can find a suitable project.  There are a number of ideas
> mentioned on the task list that sound exciting.  The two most
> promising could involve applying machine learning (my
> background) to fuseki tuning or improving the group-safety
> heuristics.  Several others, such as speeding up tactical
> reading, also sound interesting but for the purposes of my
> class, the students need the exercise of designing and
> implementing new code modules.  Perhaps two other ideas worth
> considering would be enabling GNU Go to think during the
> opponent's move and making the engine run on a cluster of
> machines.

Could you subscribe to the development list and discuss these
ideas there?

Dan