[computer-go] Hello / Pondering

[Chris Fant]

> You can:
>
> a) Guess your opponents next response, and assume they will make this
> move. Fire off a search from the resultant position. If you guess
> correctly, then you save X seconds. But if you only guess correctly p
> % of the time, you expect to gain pX seconds of extra thinking time
> per move.
>
> b) Think as if you were your opponent. Once your opponent makes a
> move, you keep the relevant sub-tree. This means that you will always
> get useful information from each ponder, but (assuming that you don't
> use the transposition information) you have wasted time searching
> moves the opponent didn't choose. I think a crude way of estimating
> the amount of time gained by this form of pondering would be to
> determine the expected value of:

Don has stated a couple of times that option (A) worked better for
him.  I chose option (B) without testing option (A) because I did not
want to have to decide how many seconds to use to guess the opponent
move before starting to think about my next move.