[computer-go] Please have your bot resign, for your own good

[Thomas Nelson]

On Wed, 2 Jan 2008, Don Dailey wrote:

> If we don't like the rules, we can talk about changing them in order to
> get behavior that fits our sensibilities better.    But we have been
> over this ground many times before.   It seems like the only reasonable
> way to properly score games is to play them out - and hence the use of
> tromp taylor rules.   In order to help the situation I made suicide
> illegal on CGOS.
>
> - Don

This raises an interesting (to me) theoretical question: is there a 
ruleset that allows games to end in a more reasonable time without 
changing general play?  I've tried teaching many beginners to play go, 
usually on a small board.  I prefer a "hands-off" style, just explaining 
the rules and letting them play until they want to pass.  But this always 
leads to games lasting two or three times as long as they need to, since 
the person playing their first game has no idea when to stop and keeps 
playing dead stones.  If try to stop them and say "that stone will day as 
soon as you place it", they have to just take my word for it, or we keep 
playing out.  Really, when two players of reasonable skill level play, 
they continue until the winner, or at least the score, is clear, then 
stop.  This is somewhat like the "end the game when it becomes statically 
sloveable" idea.  I wonder if it would be possible to have some referee 
type bot that could stop the game when it was certain of the outcome.  I 
could even imagine an alternate go ruleset where there was no passing at 
all, but the game ended when the fate of each point on the board was 
certain.  Of course, implementing those rules would require a fairly 
strong go playing agent, and it's quite possible lower-skilled agents 
would disagree with its assessment!

-Tom