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Hi,

I have heard the complaint a few times, that the tournament "has to" programmed in Java/Scala (I know there are other JVM based languages, but it's still limiting). One idea was to implement a server, that interfaces with the existing infrastructure, where clients communicate via a network/local connection. I'm not sure if there will be enough time to implement this properly for this cycle, but I wanted to bring the point up anyway.

I've made a few sketches of how this would look like, but skimming the structure of the project, I don't think it can be trivially implemented without some restructuring.

The obvious advantage would be that nobody has to use a language they are uncomfortable with, so there are fewer advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantages would be that some languages can perform faster than others, there might delay, and monitoring the usage or resources could be harder. Also, security-wise, the clients would have to be containerised, to not manipulate the host system.

A protocol shouldn't have to be anything complicated, with some inspiration from using GTP, I could imagine something like, that should be parsable by even a programm written in C, without too much work.

  # this is a comment
  # lines beginning with ">" are client input, "<" are client output
  # the first two charachters of a line aren't part of the protocol
> version 1
> kahla 7 5 # start Kahla(7, 5)
> assign-player south
< sow-pit 3 south
> sow-pit 4 north
...
< resign

If there is any interest, further details could be discussed. I'm neither an expert when it comes to game protocols, nor Kalah, so there are certainly things that could be improved.

Even though there are issues, and work would have to be done, code has to be implemented, I do think it would be interesting. I wouldn't have opened the issue if that wasn't the case.

I noticed that the game continues if an agent does choose an illegal move.
Further, if the move is illegal, some random position is chosen.
Is that the intended behavior?

TODO:

• Can adding submissions into the project be improved?
• Log everything, including exceptions.
• Separate out which agents participate in each round of the tournament. The idea is not to do it automatically, but let the person running the tournament simply list the agent names for the next round in a file, or similar (see Dennis' explanation).