Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T10:32:40.942Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

A library of eyes in Go, I: A life-and-death definition consistent with bent-4

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2011

Michael H. Albert
Affiliation:
University of Otago, New Zealand
Richard J. Nowakowski
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia
Get access

Summary

Abstract. In the game of Go we develop a consistent procedural definition of the status of life-and-death problems. This computationally efficient procedure determines the number of external ko threats that are necessary and sufficient to win, and in the case of positions of the type of bent-4-in-the-corner it finds that they are unconditionally dead in agreement with common practice. A rigorous definition of the status of life-and-death problems became necessary for building a library of monolithic eyes (eyes surrounded by only one chain). It is also needed for comparisons of life-and-death programs when solving automatically thousands of problems to analyse whether different results obtained by different programs are due to different status definitions or due to bugs.

Introduction

Overview. In this contribution we describe a project whose aim was to built a data base of eyes together with their life-and-death status which at least reflects one aspect of ko accurately: the number of necessary external ko threats for the weaker side to win. The procedure how to determine this number is described in Section 2. After that we seem to be ready for determining the status of a life-and-death problem if there would not be the bent-4-in-the-corner positions (in the following called bent-4) which are characterized in Section 3 and force us in Section 4 to refine the procedure that we take as the (procedural) definition of the status of a life-and-death problem.

Type
Chapter
Information
Games of No Chance 3 , pp. 233 - 248
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×