[Bug-gnubg] common bot protocol

[Frank Berger]

> I've sometimes thought that it's best to just extract this evaluation
> functions and build up a whole new interface around it.
>
> (I've also been in contact with Harald Wittman, the author of loner  
> and
> mloner, and we've been thinking of making a common API for  
> evaluation of
> backgammon positions. However, this is difficult as well.)

The separation from the AI and the User interface is quite logical  
for several reasons.
The most important for me is: both parts are real hard work and take  
a lot of time. An awful lot of time. If there would be a standard for  
AI's like winboard or UCI for chess engines someone could concentrate  
on the AI, some other on the user interface. Comparing and  
experimenting with bots would be easier too. That was one reason,  
that BGBlitz supported this from the very start (just I failed on  
getting progamms from other people to plug in; the 4 bots that are  
running are either from me (TachiAI) or ported and I don't have the  
rights to publish them). Anyway the notion of of pluggable AI make  
perfect sense to me.

I just scanned the article about winboard. Using pipes is pretty  
simple and probably works on most OS, I would only extend it, so that  
the transport level (pipes in the case of winboard) is separatly  
treated from the content. E.g. having a plain socket connection,  
might be useful too if the AI runs on another box.

I personally don't think, that it is too difficult to separate the AI  
from the rest:
- in BGBlitz there are several levels from providing only a neural  
net, to doing everything include cube stuff.
  It wasn't particulary diffcult, but naturally I started with that  
approach. The drawback is, that this is at
  object/method level. Communication should go over some wire.

- Here comes the latest dueller from Tony Lezard into play. Dueller  
communicates with BGBlitz via TCP/IP. It
  naturally should be augmented, because the dueller has slightly  
different demands, but that should be no
  major problem. The point is, that it was just a few days to get it  
up and running. It used a proprietary
  ASCII based protocol. I just asked Tony, whther it is ok to  
publish it.

- for another project I made BGBlitz available via a custom XML/TCP- 
IP. Again it was just a few days of work.
  Naturally one could use a standard XML-Protocol like SOAP or XML- 
RPC, I just felt that custom XML was more
  appropriate in that case.

So if a proposal is not using integration with dll/shared libraries  
etc. but with pipes/sockects/any other it is doable. And I assume  
such a protocol would lead to a proliferation of BG-AIs if there User  
interface is attractive enough.

If you really want to set up such stuff, you can count on my support  
and having Harald Wittman on board would be simply great.


ciao
Frank