On Wed, Aug 15, 2001 at 08:41:49AM -0400, Don Dailey wrote:
We are not talking about hundreds of complicated commands, only about 12 or so, and they are trivial to implement. Probably the most complicated command I would like to see is "undo" (which apparantly many programmers find hard to do.)
My program -- 12th out of 12 at the 21st century cup -- implemented "undo" very early, so that it could analyze variations. So I should be all set, I guess.
"It was another fine day on the Full Featured Go Server. I was playing Chinese rules with situational superko, free placement of three handicap stones, 15 minutes basic time plus 10 minutes byoyomi, plus Ing-style buying time, 90 seconds per point. I was 7 minutes and 1 move into my first byo-yomi period and my opponent had bought 270 seconds of time and used 206 of them when the server told me to undo my last move because my opponent had changed his mind. Fortunately, I've never found undo hard to do."
But if we could get a consensus here that feature creep won't be a problem, maybe I'd be more enthusiastic.:-)
In my (admittedly limited) experience, undo is not a core feature for portable communication between a Go-playing program and its opponent. I was expecting GTP to replace GMP, mostly, and secondarily to replace IGS protocol for computers playing on IGS-style servers. GMP seems to be used almost entirely in tournaments, where undo isn't allowed. The computers that I'm familiar with play on Internet servers in part to establish their ratings, and as far as I know no one has a good scheme for judiciously allowing undo without being taken advantage of by the usual emboldened-by-anonymity Internet twit.
Both GMP and IGS protocol support undo. How many programs actually use it?