Re: [gnugo-devel] Go: Quick Strategic Assessments

[Arend Bayer]

Hi,

sorry I have to make this a short reply for now due to lack of time...

> Out of curiousity, I did a web search to see the state of Go programming
> these days, and came across the Gnu Go site. From your documentation website, 
> you
> list as a need the following: "Create a way to quickly assess the safety of a
> group. This might take into account number of eyes / half eyes, moyo in
> corners, moyo along the edge, moyo in the center, proximity to living friendly
> groups, weak opponent groups etc. The point is that it should involve no 
> reading
> and that it is quick. This could be used to make a strategic estimation of 
> how a
> move strengthens a friendly group and/or weakens an opponent group and how
> strong/weak groups influence each other."

This is actually a bit misleading. We do have various way to estimate
the weakness of groups. Main input: 1. Potential territory belonging
to the group (this might be similar what to what you have done),
2. escape potential, 3. number of eyes.

You can see most of this if you invoke gnugo with "-w" as command option
(e.g. gnugo -l game.sgf -L 50 -w -t).
The problem is that they are overall not working very well.

As you have done s.th. like this, you might well have ideas to improve
it, or maybe your code is better, or whatever. It would certainly
be interesting to compare your weakness estimate to the "weakness value"
gnugo is computing.

Arend