Computer Go reference bots

Interested in Computer Go? Then you probably already know about Don Dailey's excellent work on providing a number of Monte Carlo reference implementations. So far, he has managed to implement it in two three different languages (Java, C and some language called Vala).

The announcement is here and the Java bot is available here. It's not the prettiest Java code out there, but Don is a C programmer (I think) so he is excused. It was very interesting and educating to study the code. I've been reading a lot of the Monte Carlo Computer Go papers but I've always felt as if I've missed something fundamental since my understanding of how it works felt too... simple.

Now that I've seen the code I can say, with confidence, that it *is* quite simple. Implementing a Monte Carlo method, that is. Getting a decent (let alone, good) AI-player for 19x19 Go seems quite far from simple.

DWR

I spent todays afternoon listening to Joe Walker, author of DWR (Direct Web Remoting) which is an AJAX toolkit for Java.

The talk was very interesting and Joe is a good talker so, all in all, it was an afternoon well spent. I've done quite a lot of JavaScript programming using XMLHttpRequest but I haven't done any AJAX programming per se. It looks quite interesting though and I'll definitely check it out.

It seems to me that using reverse AJAX (with DWR) you can create a Model 1 web application which completely separates the View (static HTML pages with some DWR-generated JavaScript files included) from the business logic (EJBs/POJOs). Simple JavaScript functions/event handlers in the HTML page triggers a function on the server which does "something" and then populate the page with the result. It's all a bit fuzzy around the edges at the moment but I'm sure I'll find out about everything that's wrong or undoable with this approach soon enough.