Rich Hutnik wrote on Wed, Oct 22, 2008 05:03 PM UTC:
Thanks you everyone for discussing this.
My interest in this is not in the minutia, or how everyone will get there,
just that we get there. In this, my main interests is that everything
everyone is working on, will be able to work with one another (of course, I have a bias towards things being easy to do, but complete, so that whatever is decided upon will get used and adopted). And, as we expand to cover more areas, everything together is able to handle it. From an IAGO perspective, the system would not only be able to handle chess variants, but also stacking games (as seen Focus, and a chess variant I saw where pieces were made up of a stack of pieces), and games with piles or areas, like the Mancala family.
If we get interoperability right here, then you could have a case where
the CV site and its members could play against people on the Scheming Mind site, for example.
This is my concern here, and I hope whatever is reached is used. I am
sure there are many paths to get to where one needs, the idea is to make
sure the paths work together.
In regards to Zillions, Zillions was an example of one program that could
work. Something else could be used instead. However, if one uses open
standards, someone may encode a plug in for Zillions to be able it to also work. The open standards approach would enable GC to be integrated with by a LOT of engines, if the makes of engines and client programs know what the specs are to code to. We can get one to work (say Axiom) and then others see it can. They would then make their programs work also, and the CV site could get more people involved and greater traffic.
Just my 2 cents. And thanks again for the input.