Re: [gnugo-devel] A New Programmer

[Arend Bayer]

> 
> > I wrote an academic go program for my Masters thesis
> > that was multi-threaded and used a multi-agent approach along with a
> > genetic algorithm.  Basically each agent generated a score for each
> > location on the board, and the evolved weights (from the GA) were used
> > to perform a weighted sum of all of the agents' boards (sort of like a
> > multi-layer neural network).  I think I might be able to use my
> > experience to help make gnugo thread-safe and possibly distributed
> > across multiple processors and/or computers.  I haven't even finished
> > reading all of the documentation yet, so I don't know how easy any of
> > this might be.
> 
> Basically, it's going to be very difficult.  Or at least touch a huge
> number of functions, because GNU Go constantly uses global variables.
> Maybe most of the changes would be more or less routine, but they are
> going to be _really_ many.
> 
> That's of course not to discourage you.  Just be warned, it's not
> anywhere a simple task.

Certainly Paul is right that it would be a big task. I think the first
step would be to make the board library thread safe (which implements
board handling, hashing etc.). Then we could see where to use it.

Arend