www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/gnugo/gnugo_121.html

search

	Buy GNU books!

GNU Go Documentation

10.2 Amalgamation

A dragon, we have said, is a group of stones which are treated as a unit. It is a working hypothesis that these stones will live or die together. Thus the program will not expect to disconnect an opponent's strings if they have been amalgamated into a single dragon.

The function make_dragons() will amalgamate worms into dragons by maintaining separate arrays worm[] and dragon[] containing similar data. Each dragon is a union of worms. Just as the data maintained in worm[] is constant on each worm, the data in dragon[] is constant on each dragon.

Amalgamation of two worms means means in practice replacing the origin of one worm by the origin of the other. Amalgamation takes place in two stages: first, the amalgamation of empty worms (cavities) into empty dragons (caves); then, the amalgamation of colored worms into dragons.