[gnugo-devel] (no subject)

[Smith, Christopher]

Hello, I am going to begin work on my honors thesis for university and was 
thinking to "Develop software to encourage and facilitate the advancement of 
Computer Go."  I was wondering what everyone thinks that Computer Go needs in 
order to advance.  (By advance I mean for computer Go programs to become 
stronger.)

Some ideas that I had came up were tools to automate testing and strength 
evaluation of a Go program. (Just like GnuGo's testing suite but at the end get 
a score based on EndGame, Opening, Life/Death, etc.  To quickly diagnose where 
a program could use improvement.)  Also, I think maybe some foundational 
algorithms to determine life/death of a group, score a game, and perhaps 
endgame analysis would be nice.

Overall the work done by GnuGo has be outstanding in terms of having a solid 
computer Go engine available for people to use, however I am looking towards 
academic type work to further computer Go as a whole.  I would appreciate any 
feedback you can offer.  Thanks!

-Chris Smith