Also a question: does the protocol include the negotiation of these terms with the engine (ie a request for it's capabilities in the first place, and an ack or something implying it can play to the terms requested) (sorry if this should be obvious in the documentation, but i've not really gone through it...) jeff
My sense of things is that if there is any kind negotiation, it need not be "built in" to the protocol, in other words it's not something that engine has to know about. A smart GTP interface should be able to direct the negotiation itself with very simple commands and it would be soley up to the implementor to provide cool features like this.
I can imagine a cool arbiter program attempting to play some given ruleset, then having one or both engines saying "not_implemented" and then having the engine move on to another ruleset until it finds something both can play. Presumably the end user can have full control over when and how this happens.
Don