Re: [gnugo-devel] owl:11

[bump]

> In general I'd agree that seki should be handled by owl.  However, it
> would seem to me that this could result in cases where the tactics code
> thinks the string is dead, but cannot find an attack point.  That seems
> like a mild problem to me, and simple seki handling (treat it as tactical
> life) seems like a reasonable solution.  Is there a reason this is a bad
> approach, beyond it really being the responsibility of the owl code and
> possible performance issues?  (Which is not to say I think those are bad
> reasons, I'm just curious.)

Seki, for example in this position, is a property of two dragons,
not their constituent strings.

I think if you think about it this is obvious. In order to
recognize that connecting at T9 by W makes seki, the life
of the entire B dragon, consisting of two separate strings,
must be considered. Since the dragons are not even defined
during make_worms, it is clear that this is a dragon problem,
not a worm problem.

There are some ad hoc seki patterns in patterns.db, mostly
in the corner, and one approach would be to try to expand
that section. Another more ambitious approach would be to
write a new function to try to recognize positions like
this. But such a function would belong in owl.c, not
reading.c.

Dan