On Sat, Jan 25, 2020 at 10:15:16AM +0000, Sarah Payne wrote: > In my opinion, a phone version would broaden appeal / access but the > most critical issue is the neural nets. XG feels like a very different > animal as an opponent - noticeably more opportunistic & aggressive, so > some degree of congruence asap seems critical for gnubg to hold > ground.
As other have already pointed, this "feeling" is most probably illusory and calling that critical seems excessive. On the other hand, I think there are some issues that could legitimely be called critical. These are situations where GNUbg could end excluded or be greatly handicapped for some use cases. Two such issues that come to mind are : - the lack of a maintained packaged Mac OS version. You wrote earlier about trying to recruit programmers. What about trying to specifically find a Mac hobbyist, or a developer or consultant interested in doing it as training ? - the inability to read XG files. It looks like matches tend increasingly to be published in this form and that people often don't bother with mat/txt exports. A few years ago Michael Petch made available a Python library with routines to decode XG matches files (maybe not single positions) but he didn't go all the way to a small utility that would convert them to a sgf file. Converting it to C and using it in gnubg itself is probably not trivial but completing the Python stuff to at least recover the moves, not the evaluations, shouldn't be too difficult.