At risk of being stepped down on ;-)
I hadn't thought of the contention case Karol outlines below which makes
my bullish comments on testing seem a bit grumpy; maybe there is a gap
which could be closed in the protocol there.
When I struggled with getting Dumbbot to assess dead groups properly I
found it was much harder than I'd expected (especially with some of the
more advanced bots like GNUGo leaving things it knew it could kill if it
had to, rather than making things obvious to lesser bots).
My solution in the end was to spool out the final position in SGF to a
local GNUGo process, ask it to "final_status_list dead" and pass on the
result. I plan to take this assessment job on myself eventually but for
now it doesn't improved DB's results (so isn't cheating) but does make
sure the live/dead status is very good at the end. Result: a happy
tournament organiser :-)
This trick isn't tricky ;-) and could be suggested for any bots that
don't do this stage well. I'm surprised the winning bot (obviously with
a strong sense of what's alive and dead during the game) was lacking in
this regard.
BTW I don't count this as a 'hybrid' program so PLEASE don't start that
thread going again!
I don't count DumbBot as a hybrid program either. Indeed I think this
is an excellent way to use GNUGo code, and I encourage other bots to do
the same.