ChouetteBot

[burper]

In the interest of bringing the files section over from improveFibs, I will post the notes I have on ChouetteBot here. Some are not quite up to date:

If you don't know what a chouette is, google the term and read a bit. It's basically backgammon for 3 or more players. One side is played by a player who is "in the box", and the other by everyone else led by a "captain". Each player on the team side maintains a separate cube with the box. If the box loses (by total), a new box and captain are determined and play begins again. It's a very social, technical, and fun form of backgammon!

The idea I had was to support chouette's on fibs by having 2 bots that played each other under direction of human players. One would be called BoxBot and the other CaptainBot, or ChouetteBot to better promote to newbies what is going on. The matches would be unlimited so that the bots never had a rating change from 1500, experience change from 0 or more than 1 saved game. The BoxBot would take input only from whoever is currently assigned to the box position, Likewise for CaptainBot, as the captain has final say about the pieces being moved. Timers and locks are implemted to make sure everyone has a chance to offer/accept/decline cubes, yet keep the play moving even if someone is too slow or has a bad net connection or drops out. The first player to join would be the box, next would be captain, player 1, player 2 etc... I could envision a chouette on fibs lasting forever.

The project mostly worked.  I could start a chouette on fibs, but before too
long a bug would show up. Several iterations of this later I realized I needed
a good testing environment for this complex beast. Maybe there are ways to isolate pieces of it for unit testing. However, there was a great deal of excitement on fibs about it at the time. I really thought it was ready.


Other than it working reliably, the biggest problem was that several GUI's
present the board numbering differently than what fibs generates. Since the
moves by the captain and box are made by kibitzing the fibs-positions, this
was confusing for several people. Biggles was a big help in testing it out, believe it or not. There are many people on fibs interested in playing chouette's, so this would be a hit I think!

I have since created a test server that fakes enough of FIBS for the bots to be tested. It runs scripts of FIBS "output" and responds correctly to the bots commands.


If only I could get avik or MadMatt interested, or some other skilled programmer from this group, I think we can get it to turn the corner. If someone would commit to writing a custom GUI client for instance... ah well, maybe some day.

[alef]

I've added the ChouetteBot pages to the FIBS board archive:
- ChouetteBot homepage
- 3 player chouette state-transition diagram
- ChouetteBot HTML board

(And taken down the equivalent posted within the forum which was difficult to read)