After thinking about this a little bit more, I think that you could implement position setup (if the position is legal of course) by simply "moving" all the stones explicitly, because I am not aware of any placement strategy that can cause a capture to happen once you have a legal position in mind. Does anyone see anything wrong with this reasoning?
Don
Yes, the position could be set up that way, but the history of the game would depend on the sequence in which stones are added, which could possibly make some future moves illegal (due to not repeating previous board positions). Thus I think Setup has to be one of the basic commands.
Anders Kierulf www.smartgo.com