In the past I've always considered implementing the GMP or anything similar a waste of time. Apart from the fact that I felt that a large part of the excitement gets lost in tournaments when the programs play automatically, all of the solutions that have passed by so far seem to be lacking some basic necessities.
If you want a protocol to be adopted by ALL Go developers, then it just has to be platform independent and programming-language independent.
For Go development I see great value in a protocol that enables automatic testing and game-play. As far as I know, the only way to achieve platform and programming-language independency is using a simple socket connection over TCP/IP. XML seems to be the obvious choice to define the protocol in, as it provides flexibility for future extensions to the protocol. Also there are many standard libraries that facilitate parsing, navigation and production of the necessary XML.
A while ago I asked here if there's a good XML definition for storing Go games in XML.. There seems to be no generally accepted standard just yet, but I find the following a good attempt: http://www.rene-grothmann.de/jago/Documentation/index.html
The main problem I have with it is that it tends to be rather verbose, but that's a general problem with XML, it's not very compact.
On another note: someone suggested organising a tournament where all source-code must be handed over to a 'trusted' person. I doubt that at a time when I was making a living out of Go software I would have handed over the source-code to anyone, no matter how trustworthy they may be.
I have heard something about people using a stolen Go engine, but I don't know the details. Of course it is very regrettable these things happen, but the suggestion of handing over source-code is a solution far worse than the problem it tries to solve. No matter how unfortunate, if you don't want your go-engine to be 'stolen' then it's your own responsibility to prevent this. And when it happens anyway, it's also your own responsibility to provide proof of it and take legal measures.
Mark Boon
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