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

[Don Dailey]

Thomas Nelson wrote:
>
>
> 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?  
There is no such rule-set that I know of.   Some people claim Japanese
scoring ends the games earlier but that still doesn't prevent players
from playing out the game needlessly - it only penalizes them for doing
so. 

CGOS uses Chinese scoring with play-outs so that we can get fully
automated scoring with no chance of errors.

- Don
  


> 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
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