Re: [gnugo-devel] trevor_1_25.2

[Arend Bayer]

> Items of particular note:
>   Mkpat generates forced anchors for Q & Y (at colors O & X).

That's very nice, I will probably use this for the intrusion patterns
as well; it will give both a speed up and resolve an inconsistency
in my experimental influence code (I need to be able to associate the
intrusion as originating from a well-defined O-stone). Can I do this
with your implementation without forcing anchors for the rest of the
database?

>   The performance of the pattern-based reading code is surprisingly
> good for the limitted effort I've put into it so far.  Here's a 
> little comparison:
>               
>               standard        pattern-based
> cputime       13.77           38.63
> nodes         130191          241246
> msec/node     .106            .160
> FAILS         0               5
> PASSES                0               5
> 
That sounds quite good. I wonder whether it could be most successful to
combine the two approaches. It might be that direct attacking moves like
liberties of the string are more quickly generated directly than via a
pattern; also, one can then continue to use the move order heuristics in
order_moves, which seem to be quite useful. This centralized handling of
move ordering might be more efficient than writing intelligent
value helpers as you have done it e.g. with RA000a.

On the other hand, the special_attack/special_rescue functions more or less
try to play the role of a pattern (their check for surrounding conditions
really looks like pattern matching). By generating those special_... moves
by patterns, one could
- very easily do tuning of these moves (of course it is more comfortable
  to create a pattern than to write a new special_rescue11 routine)
- give them intelligent values so that they sort into the other moves in
  a sensible order.

Just some guesses.

Arend