Hello all,
I notice in the git log that it's been a couple years since the last entry, with development sputtering out completely after the 3.9.1 release in December 2010. It would appear that rise of Monte Carlo methods was a major factor in the tail-off leading up to that, with the MCTS implementation in montecarlo.c quickly falling behind the state of the art.
It's pointed out in the TODO file that the classical engine in GNU Go was written before multithreading was an everyday concern, and that seems to affect the Monte Carlo effort as well (the many global variables in board.h aren't much more conducive to playouts than they are to thread safety, etc.).
Petri Pitkanen alluded recently in this list (
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnugo-devel/2013-05/msg00002.html) to the possibility of informing MCTS with GG knowledge. Similar thoughts are mentioned in the TODO file: "Make the Monte Carlo search and/or simulations take advantage of the tactical/connection/owl/semeai reading results. [Extremely difficult]." Presumably the indicated engineering difficulty is the crux of the matter, but it seems to me that unless such a thing is done, this project is effectively dead (barring some newfangled class of algorithms scrambling the landscape again).
It seems substantial prep work to modernize the structure of the of the historical GG engine would be called for, along with some serious refactoring, after which one could *start* to tackle the above integration with some hope of success (assuming there's some strength pay-off to be had by going that route).
With all that said, I have two questions:
(1) Is this a fair assessment of the situation?
(2) Is the community open to such an effort? (is there a community to speak of, anymore?)
Thanks,
Chad