Re: [computer-go] GTP and Tourney in SmartGo 1.4

[Evan Daniel <ebdaniel@xxxxxxxx>]

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Mark Boon wrote:
| 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

While for some things I like XML, I think it is unneeded for a
communications protocol here.  My understanding is that GTP is designed
to do one thing well, namely communicate with a go engine.  I think XML
adds a lot of extra baggage that is no needed here, with no clear gains
anywhere.  If the needs were more complicated, then I would understand
it, but I think simplicity is a good thing here.  And, having
implemented both ends of the GTP protocol, I believe that it is almost
as easy to implement GTP from scratch as it is to implement XML using
standard libraries.  For example, consider the following GTP session:

boardsize 19
=

play black Q16
=

genmove white
= D4

That's perfectly readable to a person, probably even one who hasn't used
GTP before, and with a very small amount of practice you can use GTP to
talk to the program manually.  These both seem like desirable features,
and I really can't see a case where XML would improve things.

Evan Daniel

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