Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 10:39:54 06/05/04
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On June 05, 2004 at 12:19:27, Uri Blass wrote: >Even if you know nothing about go except the rules... Which rule set am I supposed to use? I decided to write a Go program once, but after a little investigation, I decided not to because there are different rule sets. It is not a big deal, but it is enough headache to keep me with computer chess. There are other games I find more interesting than computer chess, but the computer chess community has so much more to offer. We have standards for data and communication protocols. There are hundreds of engines we can play against, all automated of course, on your home computer, or on the internet. Any amateur programmer can have his engine run in any number of nice, commercial quality GUIs by only knowing how to use printf(). I wrote an amazons program once, and I wondered if there were any data standards or protocols like we have in chess, so I asked around. Here is one response. "Nothing whatsoever. There isn't even consensus about - what to call an amazon/piece/queen, - what to call a shot/throw/block/arrow, - whether first player is red/white/black, - which move notations are acceptable and recommended, - how to score endgames without playing on until death, - how to score the final score, - how to deal with first player's advantage." Games that can't make guarentees are not very interesting to me at this point, because I have a game that does make guarentees, chess. It is not likely that the way chess is played will change. We may have FRC and other things become more popular, but chess will still be chess. Maybe I would compute the equivalent of endgame tablebases for Go or Amazons, but then they only work in one rule set for Go, and the rules for scoring in one Amazons tournament might be different than the rules for scoring in another, so I can't use them. Or maybe I create a huge opening database for Amazons, but the tournament I want to enter uses the "flip rule" where the second player can either play his own move or take the move of the first player on the very first move, which changes the strategy completely. Why waste my time when I have chess?
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