[Bug-gnubg] Suggestions for GNUbg

[Holger]

Hi GNUbg team,

After my bug report yesterday I would like to express some wishes and
suggestions regarding GNUbg.

The feature I most wanted is already fulfilled, you have added constant
display of pip counts. Thanks for that.

In the game record window you show the moves of both players in the same
order. But the points on the board are just numbered once from 1 to 24.
Thus, black (player 1) moves from 24 to 1 and white (player 0) should play
from 1 to 24 (but is listed from 24 to 1, too). The way you have it is
confusing when I check the moves for white as they don't coincide with the
board numbers.

When playing against GNUbg and afterwards saving the match, could you add
the date in the sgf-file? (If the DT-property was already present when
GNUbg opens a file it does save it again. And it also displays it correctly
in the match information window.)

Then, it would be nice to have keyboard shortcuts for preferably all menu
commands. I don't know if it's possible or as easy with GTK like in Windows
just to put an ampersand in front of the shortcut letter (which will get
underlined then).

And now for the more sophisticated things:

Some weeks ago (some build of July) GNUbg had background analysis, i.e.,
one could continue to play or browse the game record window while GNUbg was
analyzing the match. This was extremely useful. As for the build 020929
everything freezes during analysis (at least on Win32, I didn't try GNUbg
on Unix yet. Btw, thanks a lot Øystein for the binaries!).

What I think would be perfect goes much beyond this and is following:

In short it's: Every time GNUbg is idle (i.e. not analyzing anything,
computing a move, a hint or whatever) it should analyze something if there
is anything useful to do.

First thing probably while playing against GNUbg would be to
analyze/compute the cube decision and move to be made by the user right
after GNUbg is done with the computation of its own move. It's not
necessary to wait until the user asks specifically for a hint and only to
start then. Especially with high settings this might take a long time.
The same is valid for the tutor mode. It doesn't make sense to wait until
the user has made his move or decision. The necessary information to
compute the move exists already.

Then, for instance in tutor mode, it would be much better to save the
analysis for later use, be it for immediate revision of a bad move (Right
now GNUbg evaluates the same situation once again after the user decided to
revise his move.) or to later save it to a file as evaluation together with
the match data.

After those computations GNUbg should start (or continue) to analyze the
(maybe imported) match if there are moves left that aren't evaluated yet.
And also rather important: These actions should all be background threads.

I know that especially the last subject is not easy to implement. But I
suppose a lot of people would be even happier.

Thanks for a great program. I'm looking forward to seeing some (or all?) of
this in GNUbg.

Regards,

        Holger