Author: Angrim
Date: 16:31:12 02/13/02
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On February 13, 2002 at 11:06:12, Edward Seid wrote: >This is a general question for chess programmers. > >Have you ever tried programming a Go engine? Or do you even have an interest or >understanding of the game of Go? > >Just curious. I became interested in the game of Go a while ago based purely on the fact that people said it was extremely hard for a computer to play. After reading all that I could find about the rules of GO, I decided that the real problem with it is that the sort of people who write chess computers find the rules of GO too vague and inconsistant and so most of them avoid it. Three things that I wanted from the rules that I was not satified with: 1. I want to be able to find a unique set of moves in any position such that the moves are legal. The set of legal moves seems to change from one country to the next, and even from one tournament to the next. 2. I want to be able to determine when the game is over. As stated elsewhere in this thread, the game of GO is over when both players agree that it is over, a condition that is hard to detect in the search tree ;) This one is actually not a huge problem, since the comp can just keep playing and pass when it thinks that all legal moves would be worse than no move, and at some point the opponent will also pass which ends the game. 3. once the game is over, it would be nice to have an algorithm that could determine who has won. Most of the heuristics I have seen for this either say "the experienced player will know" or involve the players taking turns moveing stones around. Note also that there are at least 3 games called GO, played on different size boards. The beginners game of 9x9 has a branching factor of at most 80, which is lower than for the game of crazyhouse which is being played with great success by computers on FICS using roughly the same search methods as for chess. The expert game of 19x19 has a branching factor of up to 360 which may require a somewhat different approach. Angrim ps. I still plan to write a GO engine someday. The fact that there are engines which play go currently proves that the problems I listed are not unbeatable.
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