Evolution of a Go program

About the development of Moyo Go Studio, software to (help) play the Oriental game of Go. Go is a two-player zero-sum game of perfect information. It is considered much harder than Chess. Currently, in spite of enormous effort expended, no computer program plays it above the level of a beginner.

Monday, November 27, 2006

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.

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