[Syntonicles]

I was working on a similar project for nearly a year. I ran into trouble finding the correct fingerings and considered a very similar approach to the one you're taking - that is a simplified hand model with a cost-based heuristic.

My personal interest was more along the lines of acquiring statistical data from expert play. I'm supremely interested in this problem from a mathematical standpoint, but the data-set did not exist and I shelved the project as I'm a novice player.

I don't think the data-set would be very hard or very expensive to construct, given several experts and a program to generate note sequences. One could also sample from a large population of players, but then you have the bootstrap problem of attracting them before you offer enough value.

There are some very promising pathways for this developing if you're interested in the statistical approach. In any case I'd love to keep up with your project if you continue on.