Re: computer-go: extracting date to beat 9d from chess and draughts scene

[Stuart Cracraft <cracraft@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 03:18 PM 11/14/99 +0100, you wrote:
>
>Could someone enlighten me as to what this wonderfull nullmove, and how to
>find it?

In regards to Go, it is simply "Pass".

I quote from Dr. D.F. Beal's paper "Experiments with the Null Move",
in Advances in Computer Chess 5, D.F. Beal, Editor, 1988:

  "The null move means changing who is to move without making any 
   other change to the game state. Some games, such as Go, allow
   the null move as a legal move; others such as Chess, do not.
   In the overwhelming majority of positions in either game, the
   null move would be a poor move, because there would be moves that
   did something beneficial for the side to play. This is true
   even if the side to play is losing, because even then the losing
   side is expected to be trying to minimise the loss, or delay it.
   ..
   In Go, the null move is never useful during the main part of the
   game, but as the game reaches the very end, both the players are
   approaching situations where they would lose rather than gain by 
   playing another stone."

--Stuart