Shallow Mind — programming problems from the game of Go
(Some programming tasks for SC 2016 — with a hat-tip to Keith Braithwaite, who sometimes uses problems of this sort in his most stimulating TDD as if you really meant it workshops)
Spurred on by my own long if intermittent history with the game, and the excitement surrounding Google/Deep Mind’s AlphaGo and its extraordinary result against Lee Sedol, here’s a small collection of programming problems arising from Go. Some of these are trivial when others are implemented, in the course of addressing these a number of more primitive operations will likely be factored out, and together they’d form the basis of a library to build on if doing something a bit more ambitious. No doubt we’ll come across a few more as we tackle them.
Identify all groups on a board
Identify all safe groups on a board
Identify all legal moves in a position (don’t forget ko!)
Identify all capturing moves in a position
Score an endgame position
Score a game in progress
Brush up on the rules of the game here:
