Re: [gnugo-devel] Questions about game rules and calculating points in GO

[Gunnar Farneback]

Trung Hoang wrote:
> I am sorry if I send this e-mail to wrong e-mail address, concerning
> my questions.

You've come to the right place.

> I have downloaded the source code for GNU Go, but I have problem
> finding the right .cpp/.h file(s)

You won't find any .cpp files since this program is written in C, not
C++, but I assume that is not a problem.

> for only the game rules,

If you with game rules mean the board logic, i.e. determining what
stones get captured, whether a move would be suicide, and so on, the
file you're primarily looking for is board.c in the engine directory.
It has dependencies on boardlib.c, hash.c, printutils.c, board.h, and
hash.h in the same directory, on the files in the sgf directory, and
on gg_utils.c, gg_utils.h, random.c, and random.h in the utils
directory.

> and how it is done to count the points in the game.

That depends entirely on what you're aiming at exactly. There's a big
difference between estimating the score during the game, after the
game is over, and after all dead stones have been removed (either by
agreement or playing it out). Only the last case is in any sense easy,
although GNU Go with varying degree of success can handle all cases.
To some extent you may be looking for the code in engine/score.c, but
this indirectly depends on a very large part of the code in the engine
directory. 

> I would be grateful if you could direct me to right file(s).

You're welcome, but I'm not sure how useful this information is. GNU
Go does in no way provide a lightweight implementation which is easy
to carry over to another project.

> I am doing a project involving Genetic Programming(GP) and Neural
> Network(NN) with recursive elements. My plan is to let the GP evolve a
> NN to play Go, to be succesful I need a fitness function. So I was
> planing to use the rules of the game as fitness function, and to
> calculate the NNs effectivness I need to know how to count the points
> in the game. Unfortunately my skills in Go is lacking, and therefore I
> should not write my own game engine for game rules, and for calulating
> points. Hopefuly GNU Go has the solution to my problems.

I would recommend that you take a look at the GTP interface of GNU Go,
at least for score estimation.

/Gunnar