Re: Diplomacy Software

From: kdb@chinet.chi.il.us (Karl Botts)

Date: Sun, 04 Feb 1990 09:23:37 +0000

>> I was thinking more along the lines of something that would assist a
>> human playing Diplomacy; help him to organize his information, manage
>> his communications, analyze scenarios, and so forth.

>I think Mr. Botts had grander visions than a mere tactical advisor,
>but I think a tactical advisor is on the outter edge of what would
>be practical to implement.

Well, actually my visons were considerably more pedestrian, at least for
the beginning.  I would just like to have a better way of organizing and
presenting the information to myself; I would do the tactical analysis.

For instance, I would like to be able to store a tree of maps, very much
like an SCCS or RCS tree of source code versions.  When I got new info,
such as the results of a recent move, or some claims by an ally of mine
about what he could see (again, I am thinking mainly about blind Dip at
the moment), or perhaps just some guesses I had made, I would make a new
version of the map.  I would need to differentiate reliable branches
-- i.e., those based only on move results -- from unreliable branches,
i.e., those contaminated by rumors or guesses.  There are lots of little
tools like this imaginable.  As I noted, the requirements are not a
great deal different from the kinds of things that would be helpful to a
GM, expecially if he was GMing several games.  This was why I thought
that something like it might exist.

I would expect to do the text processing with the shell and awk and such
as much as possible.  You could almost do the whole thing with shell
scripts, except that it would seem that somewhere along the line you are
going to have to manage a fairly complex graph, with countries as vertices and
legal moves as edges, and info atttached to the vertices representing
units; call such a graph a "Dip State".  This would be more work to deal
with using text processing tools than in C.  It's not a big deal, though;
it's not really a very big graph.

I had some idea that if I had a general purpose tool that could manipulate
such graphs -- store them in files, apply diffs to them, and such -- I
could hook it up with some text processing and see what I could do.

The main thing I need to build such a program is the data; the countries
and the legal moves between them and so forth.  I suppose I could produce
it by pouring through the Dip manual, but I know there are some ambiguities
that have been resolved by tradition, and besides it would be laborious and
error prone -- just a crummy data entry job.  It occurred to me that GMs
must have such data already, or Eric_S_Klien at least, and I was hoping
somebody would mail it to me...

Karl Botts
kdb@chinet.chi.il.us, ...{mcdchg|att|nucsrl|gargoyle}!chinet!kdb

References

Diplomacy Software
kdb@chinet.chi.il.us (Karl Botts)
Mon, 22 Jan 1990 06:24:56 +0000
Re: Diplomacy Software
hall@nvuxh.UUCP (Michael R Hall)
Tue, 30 Jan 1990 03:15:11 +0000