Re: [gnugo-devel] reinstating value(100) owl defense moves?

[Heikki Levanto]

On Wed, Sep 01, 2004 at 04:43:55PM -0400, Evan Daniel wrote:
> Thinking about the owl code, it occurred to me that there could
> perhaps be significant gains to be had by reinstating and judicious
> use of the special case of value(100) for owl defense moves.  That is,
> if an owl defense pattern matches and has value(100), owl_defend
> declares victory without further reading.
> 
> Clearly, bad patterns here could cause significant problems, so
> caution would be needed.  However, I believe the potential gains are
> also quite significant.  Currently, for example, owl reads out the
> life and death of the tripod group every time it appears in a game. 
> It gets it right, and considers all important variations, but it takes
> over 400 owl nodes to do it.  

Sounds like a good idea to me. You already pointed out the risk of bad
patterns. One easy way to overcome that would be to create an option
that would declare victory when the pattern matches, and then read it
all out anyway, probably with increased node and depth limits. If it
ever found a mismatch, it should crash and burn in a very visible way...
Just running through some games already in the regression set with this
option should give us decent confidence in the patterns getting it
right.  (Maybe something like this could be used for generating patterns
automagically, in some future version??)

-H

-- 
Heikki Levanto   "In Murphy We Turst"     heikki (at) lsd (dot) dk