On Tue, 2007-06-05 at 12:28 -0700, Peter Drake wrote: > Don't maintain the list of legal moves -- maintain the list of vacant > points (almost all of which are legal). When it's time to pick a move, > pick a random point in the list and iterate through checking each move > for legality. As soon as you find a legal one, play it.
But you can do both. It's simpler than it sounds. I'm essentially doing what you suggest, but it's perfectly random, no bias. And I doubt there is any cost that can be easily measured. So I'm only temporarily maintaining a list of illegal but unoccupied points - this list gets "discarded" as soon as a legal move is tried. What you are doing is to avoid the call to the random number generator by trying the moves as a circular list. This may be faster, but it's biased, perhaps the bias is insignificant enough that it doesn't have an impact on the strength. You might improve the bias by "shuffling on the fly", perhaps when you find a legal move in the un-occupied point section of the list you could do a swap with the first move and a random move. I'm wondering if the biased ordering of the list persists from move to move? Maybe I benchmark your idea at some point. - Don > (My "legality" check does eliminate playing in a probable eye.) _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
