after receiving generous help from 'apt1002' in the datastructure department, I am happy to announce Disco 0.3 (see my previous posting about Disco).
the new version is about ten times faster than 0.2 (from around 600 games per second on my PC to about 6000). in addition it now checks for positional superko (repeated positions), so it can now play on CGOS without making illegal moves half of the games.
interestingly, using CPython there is not much difference in speed between 0.2 and 0.3, while the speedup from using Shedskin goes from about 6 to 75 times! this is probably mostly due to avoiding (re)allocations, which of course aren't much faster in C++ than in CPython.. but the new datastructures are also a bit smarter in maintaining only the most necessary information.
the sourcecode is still only about 400 lines, but now slightly less readable.. I hope to clean this up a bit over the next few months, but other than I will be too busy. in the long-term, it would be interesting to add shape analyses and additions to UCT such as RAVE/AMAF, and try to keep all of that in a pretty package of under 1,000 lines..
