[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] Haskell Chess

[Maxime Henrion]

Andrew Wagner wrote:
> Steffen,
> I've done some chess AI programming in the past, so I'd be happy to
> help with this project. I have some pretty fundamental design
> suggestions that I'll write up for the wiki page.
> 
> Maxime,
> Handling different chess engines isn't hard. chess engine
> communication is pretty standardized - you would just need to add
> support for the winboard and/or UCI protocols. FICS is a little bit
> harder, but it's just a pure test stream over a socket, somewhat like
> IRC, but less defined. ICC (another chess server) has a slightly
> better-defined protocol. I can get you more details on any of these
> protocols (except maybe FICS, which I don't think is documented), if
> you'd like. By the way, how portable is your graphics code going to
> be?

I haven't yet looked in details at the winboard protocol or UCI,
but having used crafty and gnuchess in CLI, I have a pretty good
idea how this is all working, and this is indeed what I intend to
do.

As for FICS, I have often played on it through telnet, so I have a
good knowledge of this text-based protocol.  I don't know of any
standard for FICS, but it isn't strictly required to get something
working.  I'd be interested in ICC support too, but since it's not
free, it'll have to wait :-).

As for the portability of the my graphics code, I can just say it's
GTK+, using Glade XML files, Cairo and SVG on top of Cairo.  All
of this is supposed to work fine on Windows, if that's what you
were asking.  I'm not sure about OS X but I think it could also
work there.  My primary target is UNIX.  For those of you who know
it, I think BabasChess under Windows sums up what I'd like to obtain
in the end quite nicely, features-wise.

I'm looking forward receiving your patches! ;-)

Cheers,
Maxime

> Sounds like this will be an interesting project. I look forward to it!
> 
> Andrew
> 
> On 3/19/07, Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> >On Mon, 2007-03-19 at 12:14 +0100, Maxime Henrion wrote:
> >
> >> I stepped onto your mail and found it particularly interesting since
> >> I'm currently writing a chess client in Haskell, using GTK+, glade
> >> and the nice Cairo library :-).  It is called LambdaChess!
> >
> >Cool! When you have something you want to show off, we could always do
> >with more expositions & screen shots etc for the Gtk2Hs website like the
> >things we've got here:
> >
> >http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/archives/category/screenshots/
> >
> >
> >And I'm glad someone is using the new SVG module that got added in the
> >latest Gtk2Hs release :-)
> >
> >Duncan
> >
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