On Sat, 06 Mar 2004 23:25:27 +0100, Hal Fulton wrote:

> Kristof Bastiaensen wrote:
>> Hello everybody.
>> 
>> I have written a library to create Chess-style boardgames with Ruby
>> (and gtk)
>> (i.e. Draughts, Shogi, Xiangqi, Chess and variants, ...). It works with
>> gtk1.2.
>> A demo is included which can play Shogi using the gnushogi engine. If
>> anybody is interested in using this library, please tell me.
>> 
>> Homepage: http://gcboard.sourceforge.net
>> 
>> 
> That's cool. I'm always in favor of more games.
> 
> I'm curious, what about Go and Othello? Aren't they played on
> square-oriented boards also? (And isn't Pente a variant of one of those?
> Refresh my memory.)
> 
> Now if someone would build a monster distributed-chess program... one
> where subtrees are farmed out to volunteer-machines via drb.
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> Hal

I am sorry, Go, Othello and Pente are not supported.
In fact my API provides just a gameboard for creating the 
GUI, but I believe it does a good job at it.
My idea was to create a comfortable environment to play
chess and similar games in.

How much I like Ruby, I don't believe it is well suited to write
a game engine in, because it would be to slow.  It may be possible
to write a interpreted language especially for game-engines.
And there is a language written for distributed computing (Mozart)
that should be faster, I don't know how well it does it job.

Pente is a variant of Gomoku (five in a row), with added
rules (like capturing) to make it more interesting.

Greetings,
Kristof