Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 11:17:14 11/27/02
Go up one level in this thread
On November 27, 2002 at 13:39:33, Peter McKenzie wrote:
>Another big difficulty of Go is the fuzzy nature of determining when a game is
>finished! There are even several grey areas ('bent 4 in the corner') in the
>rules, and two different versions of the rules, when it comes to scoring the
>game.
>
>Peter
I remember when I first tried to learn how to play go. I wanted to play a
computer on a very small board to try to understand some aspect of the strategy
that was used. I remember talking to a guy who played dots/boxes and he used the
strategies he saw in smaller boards (which had been solved) in larger board
games of dots/boxes, so I figured a similar approach might work for go, since it
seems a little harder to understand than chess (IE a beginner in chess can learn
that the pieces are roughly worth 1, 3, 3, 5, 9 and have *some* strategy).
Anyway, the smallest I could find was gnu go which played on a 5x5 board, so I
set out to write a program that would play on even smaller boards. So I set out
to research the rules, and just as you say, there are a number of different rule
sets which make it difficult to write a go program without having numerous flags
to determine which rule set you are playing with. I'd like to give go
programming a try, but this little mess with the rule sets bugs me quite a bit
(in the same way that a transposition table used to bother me because "it might
give a bad score").
I remember posting a question to a go newsgroup (rec.games.go?) asking who wins
a 2x2 game of go, and there was no consensus for even that small of a board
because of the various rule sets. Apparently that question has been asked many
times before and no one could agree.
Russell
This page took 0.01 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.