So, all of the code changes I was planning to make to GNU Backgammon are finished…
…but right as I was looking into submitting a patch, I found the code used to generate and train the neural nets used to evaluate the positions.
See, I'd been laboring under the impression that the lead maintainer for the project had some specialized setup for training the nets, and that I'd have to defer to them because of that, but no. Apparently, there's just a program in a separate repository that you can build and run that'll train them for you. I've no idea how long it'd take to run on my hardware, but it's there all the same.
Between finding that code, and seeing on the bug tracker that it took the GNUBG maintainers some 3 months to review and merge in a different code patch someone had submitted that made 10 lines' worth of changes in a single file, my perspective on the situation has changed.
Perhaps I should simply train my own neural nets and release them with this evaluation code I've been slaving over as a standalone project, as a lean & mean backgammon library free from all of the jank and cruft of GNUBG that could be attached to any arbitrary front end. It'd all still be free and open source, of course, but it'd become proper Kyou machinery that way—and I was already planning on doing something similar with the Javascript re-implementation anyway…
