On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 7:34 AM, folkert <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Should a bot understand and handle super ko to be able to play on CGOS?
>

No.   You can still play but you will lose if you violate any of the rules.
  A game cannot be reasonably played with rules and you don't just relax
rules because someone or some program doesn't want to implement it.

Is it a huge deal?    Probably not - but positional superko is one of the
rules for CGOS play and it's not like this is some bizarre made up rule,
 it's very standard.

Such a change would also have side-effects and I have discovered as a
software engineer that trying to get clever usually comes with a lot of
pain.      Do some research and try to figure out WHY there is even a
superko rule in the first place to see what I mean.     Then you have to
determine what to do about normal ko, which is a subset of superko.     Oh
boy, now we have to start coding exceptions to rules and redefining
concepts ...  yuck!

Would this be a disadvantage to the conforming program?   I ask that
because I don't know the answer.    Suppose one program ignored the superko
rule and the other program thought it had to honor it,    couldn't that
make "gaming" the system possible?

I don't know how likely this is but what about a possible scenario where
one program is winning based on believe the opponent has to avoid superko
but he doesn't?       Such a rule might require the currently conforming
bots to have to reprogram in order to accomodate the programs that refuse
to conform.      That does not seem fair to me.      And what about long ko
cycles where the game just comes down to who has the most time on their
clocks?     I think CGOS has a hard coded game limit - a very liberal one
but a limit nonetheless and now games (especially with 2 non-conforming
bots) could go thousands of moves - as fast as the bots can play they can
generated huge SGF game files.

I don't know how valid all my concerns are here, but I am really not
inclined to just change the rules for the benefit of lazy programmers
especially when the change idea is to create a non-standard hybrid of
sensible rules.


Don




>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Folkert van Heusden
>
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