Oops! I did not reply to the list before ....
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [gtp] boardsize and clear_board Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2005 13:43:12 +0200 From: Joan Pons Semelis SEMELIS@terra.es To: Chris Spencer ckspencer@verizon.net References: 200507171946.j6HJkVKC003953@koeberg.lysator.liu.se 42DABE96.4050507@verizon.net
Chris Spencer wrote:
Gunnar Farnebäck wrote:
The reason to introduce clear_board was that it seemed silly to be clearing the board as a side effect of setting the boardsize. It would have been an option to still require boardsize to also clear the board but I thought it made more sense to have those commands orthogonal. In part this is also a symmetry with not requiring the board to be empty at startup, which is useful when you can specify an initial position externally (in the case of GNU Go as a command line option).
Only the only problem I see with this rationale is that I can't think of a situation where I would resize the board without clearing it. Resizing the board without clearing results in a board with an essentially meaningless piece arraignment. Is there really a useful case where you would resize the board but wish to save the positions that weren't truncated as a result of the resizing?
Yes: setting up a joseki of the type territory versus influence and cheking again different sizes and rest of the board positions to see how the influence side of the joseki works. You can do this to a limited extend even in sgf format, and I use this feature from time to time.
I agree that it's intuitive to have a clear_board command. However, not clearing the board after a resize seems unintuitive to me.
Sincerely, Chris Spencer
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