I see this as two steps:
1.) A front end which displays the board, and allows the user to
click the mouse to play a stone. Preferably also a few facilities such
as "undo last move".
2.) An engine which receives the board state from the front end, uses
a simple algorithm to play a stone, and passes its move back to the
front end for display. It could have several algorithms with different
skill levels.
I claim that I can do step 2. Probably many other people can too, it's
more interesting than step 1.
I shall look into what happened to the aborted project, and see if I can
revive it.
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