Re: [gnugo-devel] influence and more

[Arend Bayer]

Inge wrote:

> > In addition to making influence.c more robust as a separate module. It
> > shouldn't be influence.c's business to interpret dragon-safeties.
> >
> > But my main motivation is that this should easily allow more flexibility
> > in using influence.c, e.g.:
> > (a) We could use it to better determine the effective size of a dragon
> > by comparing territory with the dragon alive to territory with the
> > dragon marked dead.
> > (b) We could for example base joseki choices on comparing territorial
> > evaluation for the respective end positions. For example, I would
> > expect the influence code to make sane decisions about which side to
> > block after a 3-3 invasion under a 4-4 stone -- if we would only ask
> > it about its opinion.
> > (c) Of course this could be used for other special cases of look-ahead.
>
> Some of these things might take a lot of time.  Do you think you could
> investigate the possibility to make them incremental like deep down in
> the board code?

Well yes, in principle, but not in the near future. In fact, while I
have never checked this, I think the main performance hit by influence
computations is the evaluation of tactical reading constraints of the
pattern in barriers.db. The way to solve this is to make the persistent
reading cache bigger (as Evan has suggested) and more efficient (I have
a few suggestions there).

Arend