Bill wrote:
It can still cause trouble though; on KGS, leaving too many rated games without finishing them gets you tagged as an escaper, so it could make people very angry if an engine sits there and won't finish a game, leaving the human with the choice of either accepting a score tha they think is wrong, or leaving the game and getting possibly tagged as an escaper.
Since you can know exactly which games are played by a program (i.e. use kgsGtp), an option would be to exclude such games in the determination of escapers. Also kgsGtp should not accept a new game (at least not rated) against a player which already has an adjourned game against the program. (I don't know whether the same players can have multiple games going on KGS.)
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.
What about games under Japanese rules? Does KGS have a way to resolve disputes between humans?
Does this sound like a reasonable solution? If any engine author is willing to try it, I could add it as a kgsGtp-specific command. Engines that support this command would be able to play rated on KGS, with no issues about cheating. On the other hand, if none of the engine authors are interested, then there's not much point in me adding it.
It's trivial to add to GNU Go, since such move generation already is implemented. In fact, playing out the game until everything except sekis are unconditionally settled is exactly what GNU Go does in its most accurate scoring mode.
Other engines may need a lot more work, at least if they want to do it well. Recognizing a bent four in the corner as dead by eye analysis is a lot simpler than proving it by playing it out since that requires knowledge of how to eliminate ko threats.
/Gunnar