On Fri, 2006-12-29 at 15:28 +0100, Łukasz Lew wrote:
> The handicaps are set up in a way that white passes between Black's
> moves.
> Ie. he gives one point to the black N-1 times.
This isn't elegant. The stones work out nicely as you say, but after
a
pass move the opponent has a right to pass and end the game. So to
implement this "correctly" we have to employ ugly inconsistencies in
the rules - exceptions. We impose pass moves at the start but also
forbid pass moves (otherwise black always wins by passing after white
passes.)
I agree however that it does accomplish several interesting objectives.
Personally, I'm not married to unification of rules, Japanese and
Chinese
are different rules and nothing will change that.
I'm actually leaning back towards John Tromps suggestion and going with
straight Tromp Taylor rules except for the suicide rule. The only
reason
I oppose the suicide rule is that it makes it possible to extend the
games to ridiculous lengths - it's merely a practical consideration.
And
I say practical because there are bots that will do it as a matter of
course.
With Tromp Taylor rules, the system would work like this:
1. Standard TT playing rules - except suicide is illegal.
2. Handicap - the weaker player is black and gets to place
N stones. Period. That is all there is to it. The
game is scored exactly the same as it is now.
The only consideration for scoring the end of the game, is
knowing what komi is. That's a necessary evil and the only
solution is to not have komi, but I'm not going to do that.
If we feel that compensation is due, for the handicap stones,
the server can add this to the komi transparently, your program
doesn't need to worry about it. More than likely I would
send a different komi for each handicap stone, but that's a
detail your program doesn't need to know about since komi is
sent at the start of the game.
I believe this is the lesser of all the evils. I wanted fixed
handicap, but this seems more compatible somehow with Chinese
rules. The weaker programs will not benefit much from the
handicap, which I don't like but it's their own fault! I suggest
the weaker programs are pre-set to place the initial stones
in logical places.
The only other little detail is how to start the games. There
are 2 reasonable possibilities:
1. Use the gtp "place_free_handicap" command.
The server asks the program to return a list of stones
to start the handicap game.
2. Just send the appropriate genmove and play commands.
I'm leaning towards option 2, because it WILL NOT REQUIRE
a single modification to your program if it already plays
on CGOS.
UNLESS, your program is incapable of playing or generating
2 moves in a row for the same color. If it doesn't, then
you have a faulty GTP implementation and should fix it anyway.
MY program just fills in the gaps with pass moves but you are
free to handle it any way you choose that works for you.
If your program is taking black you would get someting
like this from the GTP channel:
clear_board
komi 0.5
boardsize 19
genmove black
genmove black
genmove black
for a 3 stone handicap game. The opponent would get the
corresponding consecutive play commands.
I know this won't make everyone happy - but I believe it is
more in the spirit of a simple logical rule-set and is what
drew me to Tromp/Taylor rules in the first place. Might as
well stick close to it.
We can call this rule-set "CGOS" - which is exactly tromp/taylor
without suicide.
- Don
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