[Computer-go] Chinese vs Tromp-Taylor rules

[Urban Hafner]

Hey everyone,

I'm still at the early stages of development of my bot
<https://github.com/ujh/iomrascalai>. Right now it only supports
Tromp-Taylor rules as this is what CGOS uses (well, almost). This is a bit
problematic, as for one my bot and GnuGo seldomly agree on a score (even
when running GnuGo 3.8 with "--chinese-rules --positional-super-ko
--capture-all-dead --score aftermath --play-out-aftermath") so running
benchmarks against GnuGo isn't completely useful. The other problem is of
course that Nick uses chinese rules for his KGS tournaments.

Now my question is what exactly do I have to do to implement chinese rules?
If I understand the differences correctly, the only difference between TT
and Chinese are (I somehow couldn't find any mention of positional super ko
in the TT rules on Senseis <http://senseis.xmp.net/?LogicalRules>, but IIRC
both use PSK):

1. Suicide isn't allowed in chinese rules
2. Dead stones are removed before scoring in chinese

Now #1 is simple and I've already implemented it as it's used by CGOS, but
how would I handle #2? I guess it needs to be a reasonably fast as it
should be used even in the playouts. It seems like a rather difficult and
error prone approach, or is there a quick way to find groups that are 100%
alive?

The alternative would be to continue using TT rules internally and just
play until there are only single point eyes left on the board.

Urban
-- 
Blog: http://bettong.net/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ujh
Homepage: http://www.urbanhafner.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://computer-go.org/pipermail/computer-go/attachments/20150306/4295447e/attachment.html>