Re: [gnugo-devel] A lot of questions

[Gunnar Farneb�ck]

Lukasz wrote:
> 1. Why trymove(PASS) is not a legal operation?

Historical reasons. This was changed in development version 3.7.1.

> 4. What do You think about incremental bookkeeping information about
> legality of moves?
>    I.e. to maintain an array of bools with false meaning that move is illegal.
>    This would avoid a repetitive checking of legality of illegal moves.

Only interesting if it measurably speeds up GNU Go itself. I can see
how it could be useful for certain uses of the board code, but we
don't want the added complexity if it doesn't give sufficient benefits.

> 5. Why there is separate play_move and trymove, is only for historical 
> reasons?
>    Why wouldn't it be good to  replace it by single function and 
>    enhance store_board with stack handling?

There are certainly historical reasons but the uses and speed/memory
tradeoffs are fairly different. If a unified variant would work well I
see no reason not to use it but for the time being I'm sceptical about
the feasibility of unification.

> 6. Why superko isn't implemented?

It has been on the TODO list for ages. So far nobody has found it
important enough to spend time on it.

/Gunnar