Neural networks in recent years have been successfully used for gameplaying. A difference between games and e.g. image processing is that the game boards get updated incrementally. Do any neural network implementations optimize for this fact?
For example, there are 361 squares on a Go board; in a typical turn, only one of those squares will change value. On the face of it, a program like AlphaGo could save time by not redoing the calculations from the other 360 squares each time it looks at a new board position.
On the other hand, if the calculations are being done on a GPU, this optimization involves moving away from the straight vector arithmetic that GPU's do so well, which would offset the efficiency gain.
On the third hand, the potential efficiency gain would become larger as you move to more complex games; how many variables are there in StarCraft?
Has anyone ever done this optimization, or studied it and given reasons for not doing it?