On Thu, 1 Jan 2004, William M. Shubert wrote:
But, it seems that the problem is solvable in another way. If you are using non-Japanese rules, then you can always just resume the game and play it out to decide which stones are dead. If there was a genmove alternative, like "genmove_cleanup" or some such, that would not pass until all dead stones were removed from the board, then rated games would work well. Basically, if the human and the computer disagree on which stones are dead, just resume the game and start sending "genmove_cleanup" commands. Once "genmove_cleanup" passes, we know that there are no dead stones left on the board. If the human thinks that there are still dead stones left, then they can resume the game again and try to kill the stones. Eventually, a point will be reached where any reasonable person and engine will agree with each other and end the game.
Let me start by a "me too" to support this idea. Adding this to GTP seems to be the final step to have completely unattended computer go tournaments.
There is one issue here that might be worth discussing. Logically, genmove_cleanup should switch to modified ko rules when playing under Japanese rules. (IANARL - rules lawyer - but I think the modification is that only passes can be used as ko threats. The problem is with bent four and an unremovable ko threat, as in a seki.)
However, I doubt anyone wants to add special case code for that to their engines, KGS (IIRC) doesn't support disputes for Japanese rules anyway, and computer go tournaments seem to use Chinese rules most of the time anyway.
So while rule set choice is missing in GTP v2, should we assume genmove_cleanup will only be issued for non-Japanese rules?
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