Random tron server

[dhartmei]

If you, like me, would like to get more games for your bot, and are willing to use your own CPU time instead of uwaterloo's,
take a look at http://www.benzedrine.cx/tcptron.c, which runs your bot locally and communicates with a remote
map server for map and moves. You get a random opponent on a random map.

The server code is http://www.benzedrine.cx/tronserver.tar.gz, which might even be useful if you run it only locally
for yourself. Both are BSD licensed.

Have fun, and join us for random games on the server mentioned in the source.

[dhartmei]

The client-server protocol has been slightly expanded, please update your client: http://www.benzedrine.cx/tcptron.c

The client can now supply a user name, and you see who you're playing against.

[dhartmei]

And now there are proper ELO ratings, too: http://www.benzedrine.cx/tron.html.

[pierrejoel]

Very cool! I'll put my bot when I get a moment.

[pierrejoel]

I've started testing it, and I must say, I'm impressed! Very easy to set up, very simple yet efficient.

Highly recommended to anyone who's sick of the "internal server errors" of the official challenge

[drewrobb]

Very nice, just started running my bot on this. Thanks for setting it up.

[jmcarthur]

This is excellent. Thanks for making and hosting it!

[DjinnKahn]

It doesn't work on Windows : ( Am I the only one using Windows? : )

[dhartmei]

It doesn't work on Windows : ( Am I the only one using Windows? : )

My Windows skills are lacking, but maybe you can modify a Windows version of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netcat to do what is needed:
connect to the IP and TCP port, start the specified program (MyTronBot), and connect its STDIN/STDOUT to the TCP socket (i.e. what the bot writes
to STDOUT is sent to the socket, what is read from the socket is sent to the bot's STDIN), with only one exception: lines that start with "INFO " should
be printed to the screen, instead of being forwarded. nc.exe -e MyTronBot does all of that, except the last part...

And then there's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygwin, which provides the headers and libraries for all the Unix/Posix functions (pipe(), fork(), exec())
used by tcptron.c.

[aramadia]

How exactly do you run it? Which port do you connect to on your server?