Corners are valuable realestate. They get an extra point if they are unoccupied.
Getting rid of the global wp_SCORES. The board scores can be calculated from move to move so there is no real advantage to having the memory (in terms of high numbers). Additonally this will make testing/verification much easier.
Zero out the score of cells that have already been played. This is being done to simplify the processing logic (just let it run on 'invalid' cells and then we just clean up at the end.)