Re: computer-go: Computer Go Tournament Program

[William Harold Newman <william.newman@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Jul 02, 2001 at 02:58:48PM -0400, Don Dailey wrote:
> 
> What do you think of this, based on John Tromp's idea:
> 
>  . After a player makes a pass, it is the other players turn to move.
> 
>  . A pass move must include a players notion of the score.  A valid
>    score to report is "undefined." 
> 
>  . The game is over when 2 passes in a row occur with the same
>    agreed upon score OR no legal moves are available for one side.  
> 
>  . There is no limit to the number of pass moves a player may make.
> 
>  . If a game ends without an agreed upon score,  an arbiter scores
>    according to a strict Tromp/Taylor end of game scoring.
> 
> 
> Feel free to improve this, but did I  capture your suggestion properly
> here?
> 
> 
> Don  
> 
> 
>    Date: Mon, 02 Jul 2001 20:09:06 +0200
>    From: Robert Jasiek <jasiek@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> 
>    Don Dailey wrote:
>    > then an   interface  could  use  the Tromp/Taylor agreement phase
> 
>    Before implementing some agreement phases their maximal
>    number during one game and the exact meaning of passes
>    should be specified. The maximal number could be one or
>    infinity, depending on the wording.
> 
>    --
>    robert jasiek

The ruleset proposed above seems to allow the match to last forever
when players disagree on the score: I pass, he passes, I pass, he
passes, I pass, and so forth. A sufficiently smart program can get out
of this deadlock by exhausting all the legal moves before it starts to
pass, but that sorta defeats the purpose of the negotiation phase. Or
if it passes a few times and the game doesn't terminate, it could set
about exhausting legal moves before it passed again; but that behavior
seems more unlike traditional human Go than anything that's been
proposed so far.

It seems natural for a disagreement between programs to cause play to
continue to the point where Tromp-Taylor scoring works, but to require
the programs to continue beyond that, to the point where there are no
legal moves left, seems pointless. Therefore IMHO it would work better
to have some number of consecutive pass moves (3, 4, whatever) suffice
to end the game regardless of whether there's agreement on the score.

-- 
William Harold Newman <william.newman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
As usual, this being a 1.3.x release, I haven't even compiled this
kernel yet.  So if it works, you should be doubly impressed. 
  -- Linus Torvalds, announcing kernel 1.3.3 on the linux-kernel mailing list.
PGP key fingerprint 85 CE 1C BA 79 8D 51 8C  B9 25 FB EE E0 C3 E5 7C