Influence
A year or so ago, I spent a lot of time designing an influence/territory function that worked differently than the classical Bouzy map. The disadvantage of a Bouzy map is that it requires quite some calculations.
My solution is incremental (I can do delta-updates to the territory/influence map) and does not require multiple "passes". So it's very fast.
I have just added it to the update.exe and this is how it looks:
It's most useful at the Fuseki/Joseki stage, because life & death is not yet taken into account.