[computer-go] 9x9 bot ratings

[Don Dailey]

Once I get the new server finished,  it will be easy to add features
outside the server such as things like this.

You can view games as they are being played with the new server too -
it's way too cool!   All of this is working great already.  I can watch
as many games being played as I want in real time and the board is very
attractive and the viewing experience very responsive.

I plan to publish the protocol so that if someone wants to make viewing
clients they can do this easily.    

This will require a special viewing client but there will be no
installation nonsense - it will be a single windows exe or linux binary
and there will be a MAC version too and no libraries, DLL's, or run-time
system will be needed.   You will just download the client and run it.
The viewing client is a different client from the gtp client that an
engine uses to play a game.   

The client won't be required but will provide a greatly enhanced
experience.   Without the client you will still have access to all the
information via a static web page and it will be at least as good as the
current CGOS even without the client.

I came real close to doing this in AJAX and actually had something
working - you could view many programs playing simultaneously via a very
dynamic web page and it was very impressive.   However it really felt
WRONG as it was DOM based with XMLHttpRequest calls back to the server
and although it appeared to be bug free I was afraid of possible web
browser incompatibilities and glitches.  It was truly a complicated
hack.  However it did work very nice on Mozilla (linux and windows), and
explorer in windows.   It was a real nightmare getting data back and
forth and because web browsers are stateless,  so it operated on a
delay.  Whatever you observed was happening 30 seconds earlier like
playing back a movie and there was javascript code keeping everything
synced up and working.   The javascript code could take a legal move and
properly execute it on the board so that I was not required to send full
board states to the web browser.

It was fun and I learned a lot,  I've never done java-script programming
before or anything more complicated than simple static web pages like
CGOS uses.   I discovered that I actually LOVE javascript and I wish it
was commonly used as a general purpose language.    Perhaps I will write
a monte carlo player in javascript that you can play on the web with the
javascript and web code base I now have!

- Don




On Fri, 2006-09-29 at 20:49 +0200, Christian Nilsson wrote:
> I'm the guilty one... And I'm taking it down since I no longer have
> time to modify it to fit the new cgoban3 and all the new bugs that
> come with it :)
> 
> I could share the code, but I really don't think it will be of any use
> to anyone. Let's just say I don't like PHP. :P
> 
> I'm sure someone can whip up a better page in no time. Perhaps Don D.
> could add something like it to the upcoming cgos server?
 

> //Christian Nilsson
> 
> On 9/29/06, House, Jason J. <jhouse at mitre.org> wrote:
> >
> >
> > I never remember who it is that maintains
> > http://go.mimuw.edu.pl/bot_rating/index.php, but it appears
> > that the owner is thinking of taking down the page.  Is that page no longer
> > of interest to other bot authors?  Who likes having that page/feature
> > available?  If the site goes down, would any want to make a similar page?
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > computer-go at computer-go.org
> > http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
> >
> >
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