The new cgos server is almost ready - but needs some more polishing up. I have an instance of it running while testing 50 programs using 3 different computers and it appears to be robust so far, after fixing some bugs of course.
I am trying to crash it by killing the connections and killing the processes and anything malicious I can do. So far so good. It's a single server, not separate servers. For instance this one server could support many different board sizes and/or time controls, etc. These I call "venues" and each is handled as if it's running on a separate server even though it isn't. Even login names and passwords are separate as is the rating systems. It's coded in C and it really feels fast. Low memory, low CPU overhead and very resource friendly. It's not quite ready yet, but I will probably be calling for some testing soon. I want to take the old CGOS off-line and run this one a few days to work out any glitches before going official with it. The client (and any clients that any of you have built) will require a very simple modification. I was able to change the regular CGOS client in just a minute or two. The modification is required to support venues (to specify which board size you want to play on.) I will make it so the old client will still work but the venue will be a specified default (which will be 9x9, 5 minutes.) I plan to let the server itself play games too, but only to fill out the case where there are no players available. You will be able to play on any ODD board size from 9x9 to 19x19 although it probably won't be much fun unless there are a few others playing on those boards too, but you would always be able to get a game even if it was by the weak server player. I'm of course interested in an algorithms for playing relatively strong move instantly for the server. Something along the lines of Lardo, which has no search and does not do simulations or anything iterative or recursive like this. Just a set of trivial rules. Lardo is about 700 ELO on 9x9, substantially stronger than random of course. I may experiment with bulding such a bot. The initial server fill in player may play mostly random however until I take the time to do this. I don't remember the rules I used in Lardo, and I don't even know if I still have the source code for it, but I think the rules are documented in this forum somewhere. Boardsize 9 will be 5 minutes and each additional odd board size higher will add 2 minutes. As it turns out, this works out for 19x19 to be 15 minutes. Currently, I plan to use komi of 7.5 for everything. It seems like this is a reasonable choice since both the 9x9 and 19x19 server are using 7.5. - Don
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