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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQS);faqs.047 gopher@boombox.micro.umn.edu --------------------------------------------------------------------- Q5: Who Develops Gopher Software? A5: Gopher was originally developed in April 1991 by the University of Minnesota Microcomputer, Workstation, Networks Center to help our campus find answers to their computer questions. It has since grown into a full-fledged World Wide Information System used by a large number of sites in the world. Many people have contributed to the project, too numerous to count. The people behind the much of the gopher software can be reached via e-mail at gopher@boombox.micro.umn.edu, or via paper mail: Internet Gopher Developers 100 Union St. SE #190 Minneapolis, MN 55455 USA Or via FAX at: +1 (612) 625-6817 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Q6: How can I set up a "CSO" phone book server? Where is the software? A6: CSO phone book servers are also known as "qi" servers. The software implementation can be gotten via anonymous ftp from uxc.cso.uiuc.edu (128.174.5.50) as /pub/qi.tar.Z. You may also see this referred to as "ph", which is what most of the clients are called. A collected set of clients for Macs, PCs, VMS, VM, etc, are in the /pub/ph.tar.Z file. There is also an archive of the mailing list for qi/ph software on the same machine. It's in /pub/info-ph.archive. You may join the list by sending email to info-ph-request@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu. This software is supported by Paul Pomes <p-pomes@uiuc.edu> Contact him for more information. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q7: Why can't I access the University of Minnesota's UPI news? A7: The University of Minnesota has a site license for UPI news, we are not allowed to distribute it off of our campus. We get our UPI news from Clarinet. For more information about getting UPI news send mail to info@clarinet.com. For information about setting up your own gopher-UPI server search the gopher-news archive for UPI. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q9: What are the type characters for the different Gopher Objects? A9: Normal IDs. 0 Item is a file 1 Item is a directory 2 Item is a CSO (qi) phone-book server 3 Error 4 Item is a BinHexed Macintosh file. 5 Item is DOS binary archive of some sort. 6 Item is a UNIX uuencoded file. 7 Item is an Index-Search server. 8 Item points to a text-based telnet session. 9 Item is a binary file! Client must read until the connection closes. Beware. T TN3270 connection. Experimental IDs. s Sound type. Data stream is a mulaw sound. g GIF type. M MIME type. Item contains MIME data. h html type. I Image type. i "inline" text type (used by panda). ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q10: When I do full-text searches I always get every document back, Why? A10: This is a problem occasionally encountered with Unix full-text indexes. It is caused by setting up the link incorrectly to a gindexd port. The Path= field should be *blank* when pointing to a gindexd index. Otherwise the client will send the path to the gindexd daemon, which interprets everything as a keyword. This path is likely to contain a pathname that is common to all of the indexed files. Thus a search generates hits on everything. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q11: When I try to build the UNIX software I get an error from make: "Must be a separator on rules line #. Stop" Why? A11: This is a problem with older makes that don't understand the "include" keyword. One easy way to cope with this problem is compiling GNU make, which does understand the include keyword. If this is too difficult, remove the line: include Makefile.config from all the Makefiles and paste in a copy of Makefile.config at the top of each Makefile. Or, instead of pasting you can make the client/server by going into the appropriate directory and typing: make -f ../Makefile.config -f Makefile ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q12: What is the relationship between Gopher and (WAIS, WWW, ftp)? A12: Gopher is intimately intertwined with these two other systems. As shipped the Unix gopher server has the capability to: - Search local WAIS indices. - Query remote WAIS servers and funnel the results to gopher clients. - Query remote ftp sites and funnel the results to gopher clients. - Be queried by WWW (World Wide Web) clients (either using built in gopher querying or using native http querying. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q13: Are papers or articles describing Gopher available? A13: Gopher has a whole chapter devoted to it in : _The_Whole_Internet_, Ed Kroll, O'Reilly, 1992 (Editors note: ..Great book, go out and buy a bunch!) Other references include: _The_Internet_Gopher_, "ConneXions", July 1992, Interop. _Exploring_Internet_GopherSpace_ "The Internet Society News", v1n2 1992, (You can subscribe to the Internet Society News by sending e-mail to isoc@nri.reston.va.us) _The_Internet_Gopher_Protocol_, Proceedings of the Twenty-Third IETF, CNRI, Section 5.3 _Internet_Gopher_, Proceedings of Canadian Networking '92 _The_Internet_Gopher_, INTERNET: Getting Started, SRI International, Section 10.5.5 _Tools_help_Internet_users_discover_on-line_treasures, Computerworld, July 20, 1992 _TCP/IP_Network_Administration_, O'Reilly. Balakrishan, B. (Oct 1992) "SPIGopher: Making SPIRES databases accessible through the Gopher protocol". SPIRES Fall '92 Workshop, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Tomer, C. Information Technology Standards for Libraries, _Journal of the American Society for Information Science_, 43(8):566-570, Sept 1992. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q14: On a DECstation I get the error message "/etc/svc.conf no such file or directory" when running the gopherd server, why? A14: This is caused by the chroot() call in gopherd. It can be easily fixed by running gopherd with the -c option. Alternatively you can copy /etc/svc.conf into a directory named "etc" inside the gopher-data directory. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q15: The boolean searching terms don't work for my full-text index, why? A15: This is probably because the searching is being provided by WAIS. WAIS opts to return all documents that contain a search phrase within certain limits. WAIS searches do return the documents with the highest "score" at the top, those documents will have the closest relevance. Alternatively you could get a booleanized version of wais from ftp.bio.indiana.edu. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q16: When linking the Unix gopher server with WAIS I get undefined symbols, such as: log_file_name logfile PrintStatus find_value Sources NumSources A17: This happens if you make gopherd before linking in the WAIS ir/ui directories. The fix is to "make clean" or remove gopherd/{waisgopher.o,Waisindex.o} and then remake gopherd. Or link the ir/ui directories first. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q18: Why don't my WAIS indexes work? I never get anything back for searches. or Why do I get "Dangling file" error messages in my logfile? A18: The problem could be in the server. The server should be run using the -c option if you want WAIS to work. Another solution is to patch the WAIS code so that it doesn't check the files on the disk. Search the gopher-news archive for "dangling". This will turn up a single document with the patch. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q19: My gopher server doesn't work under inetd, why? A19: It could be that your inetd server only supports a limited amount of arguments. For instance, the maximum number of arguments to an inetd server is 5. You can get around this by combining arguments: i.e. gopherd -I -c becomes: gopherd -Ic You may also leave the port specifier off of the command line. The gopher server automagically finds out the port it's running on. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q20: This is not a bug report, just a curiousity. I managed to install gopher on my PC, more or less by myself, which is a pretty good accomplishment, for someone who hasn't installed hardly anything on a PC. I then proceeded to load my PC/TCP kernel, ETHDRV, and try to start up gopher. It said it couldn't initialize that stack(?). I have to load this whenever I use PC/TCP. Incredibly, when I did not load ETHDRV, Gopher came up immediately and telneted to our local server. How does it know what kernel to load? A20 Dr. Science says, The Internet Gopher program is not actually computer program at all, but a collection of magical incantations handed down from Dark Age conjurors. It works by sending magical "demons" through the air, which scour the world for information, and then return to cast illusions containing the answer. When you use the Gopher, your computer isn't actually doing anything at all. Instead, these demons have mesmirized you with an evil magical spell, which was invoked by the pattern of finger-movements peculiar to the typing of the letters G-O-P-H-E-R on your keyboard. This spell transmits demonic information directly to your brain. Scientists aren't certain of the long-term effects of demonic mesmirization, although former presidents have suffered only minor medical side-effects from it. Indeed, since Magic and Science are usually opposed to each other, most Scientists are usually close-minded about such issues, and will usually respond with some vacuous non-answer about "packet drivers", "stacks", and other such jargon. Unlike conventional scientists, Dr. Science is very open-minded and is willing to deal with such issues in a frank and honest manner. This is why people come to him with questions, and why they've learned to rely on and live by his answers. Dr. Science "I'm not a real doctor; I have a Master's Degree.... in SCIENCE!" :-) :-) :-) :-) There's always room for a little humor in a FAQ.. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q21: Help! I have PC-NFS and want to use the PC-Gopher client. How? A21: Use a piece of software called PKTMUX, available at fine ftp sites everywhere. This will let you use any packet driver application. Or, aquire a client that supports PC-NFS. See Q2. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q22: How do I nuke a hung TCP connection? I can't restart my UNIX gopher server unless I get rid of it, and I don't want to reboot! A22: Here is an example of using dbx to change a socket from CLOSING to CLOSED. # netstat -A|grep CLOSING c4bc5100 tcp 0 11 mymachine.gopher 129.89.8.4.70 CLOSING # dbx -k /vmunix /dev/mem ... (dbx) 0xc4bc5100+8/1X -- display contents of PCB+8 c4bc5108: 00000007 (dbx) assign 0xc4bc5108=0 -- zero it 0 (dbx) q After a minute or two, the CLOSED socket should disappear. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q23: Is there somewhere I can retrieve a list of announced gopher links? I'd like to keep a local, up-to-date list of available gopher holes without requiring our users to gopher to umn just to scan GopherSpace. A23: In the Unix client/server distribution is a perl script called "gopherdist". Gopherdist can fetch the contents of any point in GopherSpace. To dump the contents of all the North American links from gopher.tc.umn.edu do the following: % gopherdist gopher.tc.umn.edu 70 "1/Other Gopher and Information Servers/North America" > .Links ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q24: Why doesn't my unix gopher client display ISO-Latin-1 characters properly? BTW I'm using a Sun workstation.. A24: It is the client's problem, the server is perfectly 8-bit transparent. The BSD curses library uses bit 8 in order to remember, whether a character has been displayed reverse. So use just /usr/5bin/cc and you get the System V curses version which is 8 bit clean. Note that this may be a problem under other versions of UNIX too... -- | Paul Lindner | lindner@boombox.micro.umn.edu | Slipping into madness | | Computer & Information Services | is good for the sake | Gophermaster | University of Minnesota | of comparision. ///// / / / /////// / / / / / / / / //// / / / / / / / / Xref: bloom-picayune.mit.edu rec.games.go:5722 news.answers:3963 Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!usenet From: adrian@u.washington.edu (Adrian Mariano) Newsgroups: rec.games.go,news.answers Subject: The Game Go -- Frequently Asked Questions Supersedes: <go-faq_719643622@athena.mit.edu> Followup-To: rec.games.go Date: 10 Nov 1992 06:00:43 GMT Organization: University of Washington Lines: 481 Approved: news-answers-request@MIT.Edu Expires: 14 Dec 1992 06:00:27 GMT Message-ID: <go-faq_721375227@athena.mit.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: pit-manager.mit.edu X-Last-Updated: 1992/10/27 Archive-name: go-faq rec.games.go Frequently Asked Questions by Adrian Mariano adrian@u.washington.edu Many FAQs, including this one, are available on the archive site rtfm.mit.edu in the directory pub/usenet/news.answers. The name under which a FAQ is archived appears after the Archive-name line at the top of the article. This FAQ is archived as go-faq. If you do not have ftp, you can request messages from rtfm by using the local mail server. Send mail to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu containing the line "send usenet/news.answers/go-faq" to get this file. Send a message containing "help" to get general information about the mail server. This FAQ is also available on the go archive site: ftp.u.washington.edu (128.95.136.1) You can log into the archive site with the username 'ftp' and any password using the 'ftp' command. The files are in various subdirectories under public/go. The file public/go/README (posted on the first of each month to rec.games.go) contains a description of all files. Filenames which appear below are relative to public/go. If you don't have ftp, send a message to ftpmail@decwrl.dec.com containing the single line "help" to get information about ftping by mail. If you absolutely cannot get the mail server to work, send an email request to adrian@u.washington.edu and I will mail you the files. The go archive site is mirrorred on ftp.pasteur.fr in the pub/Go directory. The mirror site is maintained by fmc@cnam.cnam.fr. Questions, comments, and corrections should be sent to adrian@u.washington.edu. 0. Table of Contents 1. What is go? 2. What are the differences between different rules? 3. How does the ranking system work? 4. What public domain programs can I get to play go? 5. What commercial programs can I get to play go? 6. How strong are the commercial programs? 7. What computer go tournaments exist? What are the prizes? 8. What are the different game record formats and how can I display them? 9. What programs can I get to display go game records? 10. How do I play games by computer? 11. Where can I get go equipment, books, etc? 12. What are the dimensions of a go board? 13. What books should I read? 1. What is go? Go is a two player strategy board game. Players take turns putting black and white pieces (called stones) on a board. Stones are placed on the intersection of the lines on the board, and can be placed on the edge or in the corner. Once played a stone can not be moved, but may be captured by the other player. A player can pass at any time. Go is generally played on a 19 by 19 board, but smaller boards such as 9 by 9 or 13 by 13 are used by beginners or for shorter games. The object of the game is to surround territory and/or your opponent's stones. The game ends when both players pass. Under Japanese rules, each intersection surrounded and each prisoner counts as a point. The player with the most points wins. An empty intersection adjacent to a stone (orthogonally) is called a liberty. For example, a single stone in the middle of the board has 4 liberties. Stones that are adjacent form groups. Every group must have at least one liberty. When a group's last liberty is filled it is captured and removed from the board. It is illegal to make a move which recreates a preceding board position (to prevent loops). The simplest repeating position is called a ko. A brief introduction to the game in Smart-Go format is available on the archive site as RULES.SG. Beginners can also get comp/igo.zip from the archive site. This is a stripped down version of Many Faces of Go for the IBM PC which includes play on the 9 by 9 board and some instructional material. 2. What are the differences between different rules? Under Chinese rules, handicap stones are given as free moves whereas with Japanese rules they are placed on the star points. Under Japanese rules, score is calculated by counting points of territory and subtracting the number of captured stones. Points in seki are not counted. With the Chinese rules, the score is calculated by counting both points of territory and the number of stones left on the board. The number of captured stones is not counted. Points surrounded in seki are counted as territory and points shared in seki are counted as 1/2 point for each player. Because the sum of the scores is always 361, only one color needs to be counted. 3. How does the ranking system work? The ranks are "kyu" and "dan". Kyu means pupil and dan means master, but there is no qualitative difference. The ranks are like positive and negative numbers (with no zero). A beginner starts out with a high kyu rank (20-30 kyu) and advances to the strongest kyu rank of 1 kyu. The next rank above 1 kyu is 1 dan (shodan), and the dan ranks proceed upward to 7 dan. On the 19x19 board, the number of handicap stones is the difference between the ranks. A 3 kyu gives seven stones to a 10 kyu. A 2 dan gives 2 stones to a 1 kyu. The professional go players have a separate dan scale which goes from 1 dan to 9 dan. The professional scale has finer gradations than the amateur scale: the difference between 9 dan and 1 dan is about 2 stones. Statistical analysis of a large number of games (over 2000) by Jos Vermaseren suggests that the probability of winning an even game is given by: P(x) = (1/2)*(2/3)^(2*x) in which x is the positive difference in rank and P(x) is the chance that the weaker player wins. You can determine your strength only by playing aginast others with known strength. There are books like "Test Your Rating", but those tests are very unreliable. On a 13x13 board, if the rank difference is "diff", then the following table gives the handicap and komi: diff Handicap Komi diff Handicap Komi diff Handicap Komi 0 0 8.5 7 3 5.5 14 5 2.5 1 0 5.5 8 3 2.5 15 5 -0.5 2 0 2.5 9 3 -0.5 16 6 5.5 3 0 -0.5 10 4 5.5 17 6 2.5 4 2 5.5 11 4 2.5 18 6 -0.5 5 2 2.5 12 4 -0.5 19 6 -3.5 6 2 -0.5 13 5 5.5 20 6 -6.5 4. What public domain programs can I get to play go? Very few public domain programs exist. Those that do are extremely weak. On the archive site, you will find comp/wally.c, which can be compiled anywhere. If you think wally.c is too strong, you can get the even weaker gnugo from prep.ai.mit.edu in pub/gnu/gnugo-1.1.tar.Z. If you have X11, you can get xgoban from the archive site (prog/xgoban-1.0.sh.Z) to act as a graphical interface to either wally or gnugo. Macintosh users can try MacGo or Dragon Go (available on the archive site). Amiga users can get Amigo (comp/amigo.lzh on the archive site). Amigo has been ported to X11 (comp/xamigo.sh.Z). If you have access to an HP9000 either 680x0 based or HP-PA risc based, you can get Many Faces of Go for X11 from ftp.uu.net in games/hp-xgo.shar.Z. 5. What commercial programs can I get to play go? The information in this section may be somewhat out of date. Prices or version numbers may be wrong. The Many Faces of Go, $59.95 (add $2.25 for shipping; in CA add sales tax) ISBN 0-923891-28-5 (Version for MSDOS) Ishi Press International Ishi Press International 76 Bonaventura Drive 20 Bruges Place San Jose, CA 95134 London England NW1 OTE Tel: (408)944-9900 FAX: (408)944-9110 071 284 4898 Ishi Press 1301-5 Yabata Chigasaki-Shi Kanagawa-ken 253 (0467)83-4369 (0467)83-4710 (fax) Japan Star of Poland, Version 3.1, $110 OPENetwork 215 Berkeley Pl. Brooklyn, NY 11217 (718) 638-2266 Nemesis Version 3 was available for $79 (also $49 for Joseki Tutor and $59 for Tactical Wizard -- tsume go analyzer). Current Nemesis is version 5. Toyogo is now located in Hawaii. Call 1-800 TOYOGO9 for details. (versions for Macintosh, PC, and NEC 9801, add $6 for shipping) Go Intellect 1990 Computer Olympiad 1st place; 1990 International Computer Go Congress world championship tied for 1st/2nd place. Go Intellect version 2.98 can be ordered directly from the author. An reduced cost upgrade from 2.0 to 2.98 is also available (Version for macintosh) Dr. Ken Chen 4407 Oak Lane Charlotte, NC 28213 Go Explorer runs on top of Smart Go and is available from Anders Kierulf. (For macintosh) Anders Kierulf Smart Game Board P.O. Box 7751 Menlo Park, CA 94026-7751 The following is taken from an ad in _Go_World, issue 53, Autumn 88: Goliath 2, Dfl 99.- (Add 10% for surface, 20% for air shipment) Intl. M.O. or cheque or remit to the following account: N.M.B. Bank Amsterdam 69.17.05.070 (Version for Atari ST, monochrome, and MSDOS) Divo Publishing M. Gijzenburg 14 2907 HG Capelle a/d IJssel The Netherlands Many Faces of Go, Nemesis, and Contender (Mac) are available from Ishi Press. Ishi Press International Ishi Press International 76 Bonaventura Drive 20 Bruges Place San Jose, CA 95134 London England NW1 OTE Tel: (408)944-9900 FAX: (408)944-9110 071 284 4898 6. How strong are the commercial programs? It's difficult to rank the programs because they are all very inconsistent in their play. They may play a sequence of moves that look dan level, or solve a dan level problem during play, but then a few moves later they will make a move that a 20 kyu would never make. Since none of the current programs can learn from their own mistakes, when the same situation comes up they will make the same bad move again. The top program in the world (Goliath) claims to be around 8 or 10 Kyu. Many Faces of Go and Nemesis claim to be 13 Kyu. Poka claims to be about 17 Kyu, and Dragon Go is about 17 kyu as well. These claims are generally based on games that are the first game the human has played against a computer. Nemesis has played in AGA rated tournaments for its rating. David Fotland (Author of Many Faces of Go) says, "I know someone who was having trouble beating Many Faces at 13 stones until I suggested he could beat it at 29 stones. He spent a few weeks trying odd moves and found some weaknesses, and now he has no trouble beating it at 29 stones. Each of the programs has different weaknesses, but they all tend to collapse tactically in a complicated position, so if attach and crosscut a lot you can usually win big." Results of 1991 North American Computer Go Tournament 1st: Many Faces of Go, By David Fotland 2nd: Go Intellect, by Ken Chen 3rd: Stone, by Kao 4th: Contender, by Lynn Beus and Jim Logan 5th: Nemesis, by Bruce Wilcox 6th: Swiss Explorer, by Martin Mueller and Anders Kierulf Swiss Explorer forfeited two games, to Many faces and Nemesis, because it was late and missed two rounds. Swiss explorer lost to Contender due to an unrecoverable crash, but Contender was ahead at the time. Nemesis lost two games, to Contender and Stone, due to unrecoverable crashes. The game between Many Faces and Go Intellect was exciting - both programs killed large enemy groups, and the score swung over 100 points each way in the middle game, then the programs left a very large ko on the board until the last dame was filled. Many Faces beat Stone by about 20 points and Nemesis and Contender by about 140 points each. Results from the 1991 World computer Go Congress: Main Computer Tournament: Place Program Author Country Wins 1 6 Goliath Mark Boon Netherlands 2 5 Go Intellect Ken Chen USA (lost to Goliath) 3 4 Dragon Tung-Yueh Liu Taiwan 4 4 Weiki III Sanechika Japan 5 4 Star of Poland Kraszek Poland 6 3 Handtalk ZhiXing Cheng China 7 3 Stone Kuo-Yuan Kao Taiwan 8 3 Modgo Knoepfle Germany 9 3 Mac Won-Ho Jee Korea 10 3 Many Faces David Fotland USA 11 2 Nemesis Bruce Wilcox USA 12 2 Hirartsuka Shigyou Japan 13 1 Explorer Martin Muller Switzerland 14 1 Daihoninbo Yoshikawa Japan (Win was due to a bye) 15 0 Go Yuzhi Yang China (crashed every round) "Best Design" prize for the program with the overall best combination of ease of use, features, look, and playing strength, went to Many Faces of Go. Goliath went on to challange the 3 human players (young 5 dans), at a 16 play handicap and won all 3 games. It challenged at the next level (14 play handicap), and lost all three games. Next year the human challenge will be at a 14 play handicap. 7. What computer go tournaments exist? What are the prizes? There is a North American Championship every year at the Go Congress the first week of August. Plaques and the title of North American Computer Go Champion are the prizes. There is a similar competition at the European Go Congress. There is a Computer Games Olympiad every year in London in the summer that includes Computer Go. The Usenix conference used have a computer go competition every year, and may still - no prizes. The big money is in the World Computer Go Congress, sponsored by Ing Chang Chi and Acer in Taiwan. They have a preliminary competition every August (formerly held in Europe, USA, and Japan, but now held in Taipei with programs that are mailed in by their authors). If you do well in the preliminary (defined as beating two of 3 benchmark programs - this year the benchmarks were Stone, Friday, and Goliath) you will be reimbursed for 1/2 of your air fare to the Congress. The congress is held on November 11 and 12 in various places. In 1990 it was in Beijing. In 1991 it was in in Singapore. First prize for the best computer program is about $8,000. Second is about $1,000 and 3rd is about $500. The winning computer program plays a 3 game series against the Taiwan youth champion (usually a 12 year old 5 Dan) and gets another $8000 if it wins. This prize went unclaimed for five years, but in 1991 Goliath beat all three human challengers, so the handicap has been decreased to 14 moves. The top prize if for winning a 7 game series against a professional (of unspecified rank) is about $1.6 Million. The contest only runs through the year 2000 so the top prize will go unclaimed.