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Re: [computer-go] How to play go with other programe?
On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 02:40:01PM +0100, Dave Denholm wrote:
> Arend Bayer <arend.bayer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> > Nick wrote:
> >> Next August, I may be helping to run the computer Go event that will form part
> >> of the European Go Congress, in Prague. Suppose I find:
> >> An entrant with a Macintosh and a program running on it
> >> An entrant with his own fast Windows PC and a program running on it
> >> Six entrants with Windows programs
> >> Eight Windows PCs provided by the sponsor
> >> and all the programs are able to support GTP.
> >>
> >> What do I do next? Some kind of cable must be involved somewhere. So let's
> >
> > Whether you choose Ethernet or WLAN or whatever -- the GTP programs
> > don't care, so I still dont understand what you mean by "inventing the
> > hardware part".
> >
>
> I agree with Nick here. A protocol needs an agreed transport to be useful.
I don't understand this. (Or perhaps I understand it and just
disagree?) I have only implemented Go Modem Protocol, not GTP (yet),
so I could be overlooking something, but I thought all that GTP needs
is the ability to push bytes down a channel and slurp bytes out of the
channel (implicitly reliably, since it doesn't have any checksumming
or retrying or anything like that). It's straightforward to map that
model (pushing and slurping bytes) onto any number of transports, and
doesn't seem to me that GTP would benefit from specifying which one.
The channel must be a TCP/IP connection? The channel must be ANSI C
stdio ids 0 and 1? The channel must be a nonnoisy parallel cable
connection with a MacII on one end and a bug-compatible FunkySpinRite
printer running a Go program written in its Postscript dialect on the
other end?
Similarly (I think) the ANSI Common Lisp standard, which I *have*
spent a fair amount of time implementing, specifies a set of
characters must exist for program sources, and it's straightforward to
map that onto various character sets (ASCII, Unicode...) and physical
representations (line printer hardcopy, MSDOS filesystem on a
double-density diskette...). It doesn't worry about specification at
the level of, say, specifying that program files will be stored in NFS
files in EBCDIC.
I do think that a tournament organizer should specify what the
connection will be like, but I don't think that it follows that the
GTP specification should specify what the connection will be like.
Similarly (I think) if I ran a programming contest where the entries
were to be programs in Common Lisp, I'd have to specify whether the
programs would be mailed to my physical address on CDROMs, or pasted
into a web page somewhere, or whatever; that doesn't mean that the
ANSI Common Lisp standard needs to talk about CDROMs and the web.
--
William Harold Newman <william.newman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs...but it is amazing
how many eggs you can break without making a decent omelette.
-- C P Issawi
PGP key fingerprint 85 CE 1C BA 79 8D 51 8C B9 25 FB EE E0 C3 E5 7C
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