We have designed a new CGOS engine client that has more features and
should be more convenient to use.
Here are the primary new features:
1. You can run multiple engines if you choose.
2. You can specify server and port.
3. Works with configuration file - so you have multiple configs for
different testing scenarios.
I would like volunteers to test the alpha version so that we can get
useful feedback. The feedback we are most interested in concerns bugs,
glitches, annoyances that can be easily fixed, not ideas for
major upgrades. If you have great ideas for future features, go to
sourceforge and join the cgos-developers and we would welcome your
feedback on this.
It would be useful to test this on unix, windows and macs. I have done
some testing on Unix, but want to know especially if there are Windows
and Mac issues although I hope for good coverage on all platforms.
The new client supports multiple engines, but does not manage
simultaneous games with these engines, instead it manages the rotation
of any specified number of players. So you may have several players
taking turns playing games on CGOS.
The players are selected randomly but you can choose the priority, for
instance setting one player up to play twice as often as another if you
choose. The priority number is a positive integer (it can be zero to
deactivate a player) and determines how often a given player will play.
The rotation schedule is not predictable, it is probabilistic so if you
do set one program to play twice as often as another, this will happen
on average, but it won't be a predictable cycle.
The probability of a particular engine playing the next game is computed
like this:
prob = p / s
where s is the sum of all the engines priority numbers and p is the
priority of the engine in question.
The client manages the connections - determining when to log on and off
the server to connect a different program so that they can be rotated in
a proper way.
The client reads the configuration file between rounds, so you can even
modify priorities or who plays between rounds without restarting the
client or temporarily deactivate a player by setting his priority to zero.
To run the client just execute it without arguments to get a usage
message which explains everything.
The alpha client version can be found here:
http://cgos.boardspace.net/public/cgosGtp_alpha.zip
Currently only a pure tcl version is available but we will be packaging
these up as executables for the various platforms soon. Or on request
we can do this right away.
- Don
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