computer-go: Go Programming Difficulties

["Xu, Mousheng (SEA)" <Mousheng.Xu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Everybody,

I have been accidentally dropped off the list for more than 8 months, so I
should have lost a lot of fun. For the period no email came to me from the
list, I thought it might be that everybody was busy dot-comming instead of
doing go programming. :)

There are about 40 common go techniques to implement. If all of these common
techniques are implemented, it's possible for the program to beat an amateur
1 dan. I am about to start implementing these ~40 techs but have not yet
done it, so I cannot say with full confidence. But I feel most if not all
these techs are not so hard to implement. Given "cutting" as an example, you
only need to 1) find the cutting point; 2) estimate if you can cut at the
point and safely escape; 3) cut it. Doing 1) & 3) are straighforward, doing
2) might be tricky but does not sound very hard. Beyond individual
techniques, you will have to synchronize them together, which will take
significant but not forbidden number of calculations. 

For those who have gone through all of these implementations, here is my
question: what am I missing? If you use assembly, I can understand why it's
not as easy as I have just said. But if you use an OO language, it would be
much easier to implement. OO is much slower (10x?) than assembly, but that's
why CPU speed come to play. It's my religion that algorithm is much more
important than speed.

Thanks a lot.

-- Mousheng Xu




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