Gothello 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):

• Gthd is the Gothello game daemon. It is invoked via e.g.

    java Gthd 0
  

  where the 0 is the server number.
• gthclient is a C client library designed to make it easy to communicate with the game daemon. It accepts and returns moves as two-character strings indicating in lowercase algebraic (chess-style) notation the move being made. 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.
• GthClient 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 Gthd daemon.
• Documentation includes a Gothello server white paper [PS][PDF] 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.

  There is also library documentation for the C game client, including a HOWTO and a UNIX manual page in various formats.

  Finally, there is documentation for the Java game library, including a HOWTO and JavaDoc for the necessary classes.

• Grossthello is my sample Java implementation of a Gothello 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 grossthello, gthd, and javalib directories in order to have this thing run.