Re: computer-go: Computer Go Tournament Program

[David Fotland <fotland@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A biasc interface to NNGS or IGS is would be simple to write if there were 
any documentation of the prototcol.
But every program has had to reverse engineer the protocol, which makes it 
much more difficult.   For reference,
my go modem protocol implementation is 1600 lines of C++ and my IGS client 
is 3600 lines.  I implement the
full modem protocol, including retries, etc, so a tournament version of GMP 
should be less than 1000 lines.  I
implement a fairly full-featured IGS interface.  I rudimentary one would be 
much smaller, but still bigger than the GMP I think.

If someone provided working code of a simple IGS/NNGS interface, it would 
be a reasonable alternative.

But I don't think a tournament director wants to plan to use a buggy version :)



At 12:15 PM 6/27/2001 +0200, you wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Jun 2001 14:48:43 -0400, John Tromp wrote:
> >Nick wrote:
> >
> >> My demands are much more modest.  I would like programs to:
> >>
> >>   Support the Go Modem Protocol, reliably.
> >
> >Has anyone written a program that acts as an arbiter between 2 programs
> >using the Go Modem Protocol? Then that arbiter could take care of 
> maintaining
> >the clock as well as saving go records. Correct labeling should already
> >be part of "reliable Go Modem Protocol support".
> >
> >>   Label the board, in the conventional orientation.
> >>   Implement a clock, correctly.
> >>   Save their game records in SGF or Ishi format.
>
>
> The NNGS server code is GPL'ed and several go programs already
> interface to it successfully.  The Go Computer Ladder games are played
> there or on IGS.  Those that don't but support GMP may be able to
> interface using Jago or something else that supports NNGS and GMP at
> the same time.  The server code can be modified at will to enable to
> tournament to run, even if one server is launched for every game or
> something.
>
> I think this is worth discussing.  Latest server source code version
> 1.1.9 code is at http://people.debian.org/~lohner/nngs  It is buggy
> since some major changes were made (languages, cleanups, etc.) but
> should become stable over the next few versions (bug reports and
> patches welcome!).
>
> Regards,
> Nils.
David Fotland