Lines Of Action Project
Software and Systems

Preliminary versions of several pieces of software are available. The model under which they operate is as follows: a game referee daemon is started manually, with a given ``server number'' in the range 0..10. Two game clients connect to the server using the hostname and server number, one requesting to play Black, the other White. When both players have successfully connected, the Black player makes the first move, and the game begins. The referee will catch illegal moves, and detect game termination.

Several pieces of software are available in support of this plan (you may download them all as a gzipped tar archive if you prefer):

• Gamed is the LOA game daemon. It is invoked via e.g.

    java Gamed 0
  

  where the 0 is the server number.
• clib is a C client library designed to make it easy to communicate with the game daemon. It accepts and returns moves as pairs of two-character strings indicating in lowercase algebraic chess notation the start and endpoint of the move. Note that you may need to compile it with the C++ compiler if you are using C++, to avoid the name mangling (or use extern "C"). Also note that you will need to compile with -lsocket -lnsl on the Solaris boxes, to get the networking code you need.
• javalib is a java client class designed to make it easy to communicate with the game daemon. It accepts and returns moves using Move objects, which happen to be identical to those used by the daemon.
• Documentation includes an LOA server white paper which defines the rules using the Z (pronounced ``Zehd'') formal notation, which is based on First-Order Logic with integer sorts. It also describes in full detail the ASCII stream protocol used for client-server communication. Thus, those who want to roll their own are not tied to the client libraries in any fashion.

  There is also library documentation for the C game library as a UNIX manual page, as well as formatted into ASCII and HTML using groff.

  Finally, there is javadoc documentation for the Java game library.

• LOA-Q is my sample Java implementation of an LOA player, used mainly for debugging. It is slow and pathetic, but may serve as a good example or starting point. Note that you need to have your CLASSPATH environment variable pointing at the loa-q, load, and javalib directories in order to have this thing run.