Gomill supports a number of GTP extension commands. These are all named with a gomill- prefix.
The extensions used by the ringmaster are as follows:
Arguments: none
Return a string containing the engine’s comments about the last move it generated.
This might include the engine’s estimate of its winning chances, a principal variation, or any other diagnostic information.
The intention is that GTP controllers which produce game records should use this command to write a comment associated with the move.
Any non-ASCII characters in the response should be encoded as UTF-8.
If no information is available, return an empty string.
The behaviour of this command is unspecified if a command changing the board state (eg play or undo) has occurred since the engine last generated a move.
Arguments: none
Return a string with a description of the engine’s configuration. This should repeat the information from the name and version commands. Controllers should expect the response to take multiple lines.
The intention is that GTP controllers which produce game records should use the output of this command as part of a comment for the game as a whole.
If possible, the response should include a description of all engine parameters which affect gameplay. If the engine plays reproducibly given the seed of a random number generator, the response should include that seed.
Any non-ASCII characters in the response should be encoded as UTF-8.
Arguments: none
Return a float (represented in decimal) giving the amount of CPU time the engine has used to generate all moves made so far (in seconds).
For engines which use multiple threads or processes, this should be the total time used on all CPUs.
It may not be possible to meaningfully respond to this command (for example, if an engine runs on multiple processors which run at different speeds); in complex cases, the engine should document how the CPU time is calculated.
Arguments: colour, list of keywords
This is a variant of the standard genmove command. Each keyword indicates a permitted (or desired) variation of behaviour. For example:
gomill-genmove_ex b claim If gomill-genmove_ex is sent without any arguments (ie, no colour is specified), the engine should return a list of the keywords it supports (one per line, like list_commands).
Engines must ignore keywords they do not support. gomill-genmove_ex with no keywords is exactly equivalent to genmove.
The following keywords are currently defined:
There is also an extension which is not used by the ringmaster:
Arguments: filename, list of SGF properties
Write an SGF game record of the current game.
See the GTP specification’s description of loadsgf for the interpretation of the filename argument.
The SGF properties should be specified in the form PropIdent=PropValue, eg RE=W+3.5. Escape spaces in values with \_, backslashes with \\. Encode non-ASCII characters in UTF-8.
These SGF properties should be added to the root node. The engine should fill in any properties it can (at least AP, SZ, KM, HA, and DT). Explicitly-specified properties should override the engine’s defaults.
The intention is that engines which have ‘comments’ about their moves (as for gomill-explain_last_move) should include them in the game record.
Example:
gomill-savesgf xxx.sgf PB=testplayer PW=GNU\_Go:3.8 RE=W+3.5 Note
GTP engines aren’t typically well placed to write game records, as they don’t have enough information to write the game metadata properly (this is why gomill-savesgf has to take the SGF properties explicitly). It’s usually better for the controller to do it. See the kgs_proxy.py example script for an example of when this command might be useful.
The gomill-explain_last_move, gomill-genmove_ex, and gomill-savesgf commands are supported by the Gomill gtp_states module.