An alternative to matching board hashes is to test for repeated move sequences. You need a separate test for each sequence length, but the most common one
should be the shortest one.
Heikki Levanto wrote:
On Thu, Jan 17, 2008 at 10:36:09PM -0500, Michael Williams wrote:
I have not tried it myself, but I'm guessing it will not improve your
engine. The cost of testing for simple ko is negligible and allowing it
will probably prolong the playouts.
I am not far enough with my engine to test yet, but my guess is that allowing
a simple ko can lead to pretty long endgames, if the ko has the only playable
moves left. It sounds that some sort of way to detect that would be good.
If we only test for a simple ko, it is possible to get into an endgame with
two kos on board, repeating for ever.
It might make sense to test for (super)ko only in the endgame, when there are
not so
many possible moves left. As long as there are many choices, a random playout
will not get stuck in a loop anyway. Then again, testing for the game state
may be as expensive as testing for ko...
I guess it is early for me to speculate on that, as my engine isn't even
playing legal moves yet... Premature optimizing, and all that.
- Heikki
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