GTP and time settings

karaklis · #1

I am currently studying the "Go Text Protocol" (GTP) which is used for communication between a GUI and a go engine. I stumbled upon the paragraph about the time settings. It says that GTP (the latest version 2 which is a draft that exists since 2002 and hasn't changed for ten years) only supports Canadian byoyomi. Does anybody know whether there are GUIs/engines that use a non-standard exstension that supports other time settings like Japanese byoyomi or Fischer?

I am brainstorming for creating a go engine, and one of the points is to have an efficient time handling, which also may be more human-like. Besides it is possibly more fun to play an engine that makes obvious moves rather quickly so that it has more time to ponder on difficult situations.

emeraldemon · #2

kgs uses its own extension command, kgs-time_settings. Quoting from the docs:

Quote:

Similar to the boardsize command, you may get several
time settings commands; any settings that your engine cannot play with,
you should return an error. If your engine supports the
kgs-time_settings command, then you will get that instead of
the standard time_settings command. The reson for the
KGS-specific time setting is that GTP's standard time settings has no
way to describe the byo-yomi time system. This system is quite popular
in tournaments and is used often on KGS. The format for the
kgs-time_settings command is the same as
time_settings, but another parameter is inserted
as the first parameter, which describes the time system as either
none, absolute, byoyomi, or canadian.
For the none and absolute time systems there will be
fewer than two options. If you do not support kgs-time_settings
and your engine is put into a byo-yomi game, kgsGtp will tell your engine
that it is an absolute time game with no byo-yomi periods and a total time
equal to the main time and all of the periods.

So if you want to support other time controls I think that's the way to do it.

emeraldemon · #3

Just an aside, if you plan to run your engine on KGS you should definitely implement final_status_list and kgs-genmove_cleanup, although those won't matter as much if you're playing tromp-taylor rules.

GTP and time settings

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