Re: [gnugo-devel] nando_3_17.6

[Arend Bayer]

Nando wrote:

> Resignation is implemented over GTP and in replay mode only, in other
> playing modes the feature is simply disabled. By default, resignation
> is disabled and can only be activated with a new command-line option
> --resign-allowed. I was actually wanting to implement it the other
> way around, e.g. active by default with a --noresign option, but I
> thought it wouldn't be easily accepted.

I vote for making it default, although maybe not immediately. The only
case where I see the need to disable it is for tournament games. (In
particular, I think it would be nice to allow resignation of NNGS games
-- if only to see whether it is working well.)

More of a concern is whether the existing clients could handle resignation.
GMP does not seem to allow resignation at all, unfortunately.

Maybe it would be cleaner not to disable resign_allowed in the playing
modes that don't support it, but instead simply ignore the negative move
value in the interface code.

> There's a couple unrelated minor changes included in this patch.
> I moved some timing variables to globals, so that it is possible to
> get these statistics even when GG still wants to play a move. I also
> added a small debugging feature in play_test.c. The idea is to be able
> to feed a perfect sequence into the engine and get a global engine
> performance indicator (see implementation for details). I'm planning
> to use it for endgame tuning.

Do I understand correctly that you compare GNU Go's valuation of the
"perfect" move with the move played by GNU Go? Yes, that looks useful.

> A final note: some worries have been expressed about handicap games.
> The testings I did showed that GG "understands" that the game is not
> yet over, even if more than 50 points behind.

My impression is that your policy so far is pretty conservative. If we
want to allow GNU Go to resign earlier on, making a couple of settings
more aggressive, then we might need to take the handicap into account.

(At the moment, we will mostly save the endgame, which usually doesn't
take very long anyway.)

Arend