AEI Readme

This package provides a specification for the Arimaa Engine Interface (AEI). It also includes some tools for using engines that implement AEI. Including an interface to the arimaa.com gameroom. A full description of AEI can be found in the file aei-protocol.txt.

The link used for communication is not specified by the AEI protocol. This implementation uses either stdio or a socket for the communication. Stdio is the preferred method for general operation, but in certain programming languages or environments it may be easier to use socket communication.

When using a socket the controller will listen on an ip and port given to the engine by adding "--server <dotted quad ip>" and "--port <port number>" options to its command line. The engine should connect to the specified address and expect the AEI protocol identifier from the controller.

The scripts included for working with an AEI engine are:

analyze

A simple script that runs an engine and has it search a given position or move sequence.

gameroom

AEI controller that connects to the arimaa.com gameroom and plays a game.

postal_controller

Keeps a bot making moves as needed in any postal games it is a participant in.

roundrobin

Plays engines against each other in a round robin tournament.

simple_engine

Very basic AEI engine, just plays random step moves.

Basic examples of using the scripts can be found in the file usage.rst.

The pyrimaa package also includes modules implementing the controller side of the AEI protocol (aei.py), the Arimaa position representation (as bitboards in board.py and x88 in x88board.py), and a few utility functions for handling Arimaa timecontrols (util.py).

setup.py can be used to install the package. It depends on python-setuptools which might need to be installed first.

The pyrimaa package needs to end up on the PYTHONPATH somehow. The intended way for this to happen is for AEI to be installed with setup.py using something like "python setup.py install".

One gotcha though is you probably don't really want it installed into the system python directories (which would also require root). If you use python for lots of different projects I'd recommend setting up a virtualenv for it.

But the easiest thing to do is a user install with "python setup.py install --user" run from the AEI directory. This will install to "~/.local". Python automatically has ~/.local/lib/blah in it's pythonpath so the scripts will work. Also if you add ~/.local/bin to your shell path then you can run the scripts using "gameroom", "analyze", etc..