Autoplay Interface?

[Mark Lefler]

I would be interested in developing a formal "Autoplay" interface which
would allow automatic testing of programs on a single machine. The
current scheme I now use was developed by John Stanback (author of
Zarkov). It uses either a control program or simple batch file to
control a match. Each porgam, when given a suitable command line
parameter, loads in a game from a file, calculates a move, then rewrites
the file appending the new move. A program can claim a win, draw or loss
based on its score, and append a text line to another file to indicate this.

There are lots of details. Anyone who is interested can get the file
"auto.txt" from this ftp site:

ftp.netcom.com, directory pub/ml/mlefler

Please send me comments on what you might be interested in, if you would
be willing to modify your program to use this interface, and any ideas
you have. Maybe we can come up with a better way of testing programs and
eliminate the "luck" factor involved in 6-7 game deciding the "world's
best" program.

-->Mark Lefler