It's not a matter of when a player cannot move ... it's when a player should not move. Your list of "winning" positions is calculable in theory, but not in practice. My initial reaction is that you would have to go forwards to find the positions, then go backwards.

One of the bigger issues that that Go, unlike Chess, has a number of identical positions. Not just considering the fact that the board is rotateable (which quadruples the number of "winning positions"), but that you could swap the NE and SW corners and have the same "winning position". Or, rotate a subsection of the board.

The rules and starting position of Chess dictate that a huge majority of the potential board arrangements can never be reached, which is why it's a much simpler game.

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Vote paco for President!

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Looking backwards to GO forwards by dragonchild
in thread Looking backwards to GO forwards by gregor42

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.