root/04/bugfix/doc/readme.txt

Kombilo 0.4 - a go database program

This program was written by Ulrich Goertz (u@g0ertz.de), and is published 
under the GNU General Public License.

What follows is a description of the features of Kombilo. To find information
how to get the program running, look at the file install.txt. The 
documentation is in the file kombilo.doc. You can also look at it from 
Kombilo's help menu.

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Acknowledgments:

- I am grateful to the people who sent me their comments and 
  suggestions for improvements. In particular, I would like to thank
  Jan van Rongen and Dave Sigaty.

- I am also grateful to David Goodger for writing the sgflib.py 
  module, which provides a SGF parser in Python, and which was used
  in previous versions of Kombilo. I now replaced it by
  a new parser that I wrote from scratch (partially in C++ to make
  it faster), but when I started the Kombilo project it was very 
  helpful to have a reliable SGF parser already available.

Disclaimer:

I have thoroughly tested Kombilo on a Linux box, and on a Windows 2000 
system. There are no bugs that I know of, but probably some bugs exist
nevertheless. So let me state clearly that this program comes WITHOUT 
ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or 
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License 
for more details.

Where to get Kombilo:

- You can download the Kombilo distribution (as a .exe installer for Windows,
  as a .tar.gz for Linux/Unix or as a .zip file for Windows/Macintosh) from

    http://www.g0ertz.de/kombilo/

  (NB: The 0 in g0ertz is a zero!)

  On that page you can also find more information about Kombilo, including
  a brief tutorial with some screenshots.

Give it a try and please send me your feedback! Any comments, and especially
bug reports are welcome. 

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Kombilo is a go database program. Its main purpose is to search for 
games in which a given pattern or position occurs. You can also
search for other criteria (like time period, players, events).

Version 0.4 of Kombilo has now been released. A few bugs in version 0.3 
have been fixed, and several features have been added (see below).

The main features of Kombilo are:

* It is free software, published under the GNU General Public License: 
  you may download and use it for free, redistribute it (and even 
  modify it, if you release the changes under the same license).

* It works on most current operating systems: The main part of Kombilo 
  is written in Python, a programming language which is available for 
  most platforms, including Unix/Linux, Windows, Macintosh ...
  For Windows, a comfortable installer is available, which makes it
  unnecessary to install Python.

* The main purpose of the program is to search for patterns in SGF files, 
  like

  |----------
  |..........
  |..........
  |...X.X....
  |..X.......    (A)
  |..XO......
  |..OO......
  |..........

  in the corner, or 

  ......
  ..XO..          
  ..OX..
  ......

  anywhere on the board. 

  Of course, you don't have to enter ASCII diagrams, but there is a 
  comfortable graphical user interface :-)

  The program produces a list of all games in which that pattern 
  occurs. You can look at the games with the included SGF viewer.

  (Currently, Kombilo does not provide a full-featured SGF editor. 
  This will come in one of the next versions, I hope. Under Linux and 
  Windows you can use your customary SGF editor instead.)

  Furthermore, Kombilo can display all the continuations that were 
  played in the search diagram. This makes it particularly easy to
  study joseki and fuseki lines.

* The database is built from game records in SGF format. The 
  program does not come with any games included. But since there 
  are many sources for games in SGF format, this should be no 
  problem.

  One possibility is to download game collections like the 
  collection of games from Cho Chikun made available by Jan van 
  Rongen, or the title games offered by Martin Mueller (see 
  http://www.g0ertz.de/go/ for links)
  
  On the other hand, there are commercial game collections. 
  Let me particularly recommend the GoGoD database compiled 
  by John Fairbairn and T Mark Hall, which includes more than
  13.500 games, and is reasonably priced. I use it myself and
  am very satisfied with it.

* Speed: 
  The algorithm that is used is more or less straightforward. 
  Nevertheless, for the moment it seems to be good enough. See
  the tutorial for a more detailed description. (If you have ideas 
  how to speed things up, I'm certainly interested in hearing 
  them ...)

  Some samples, with the GoGoD database consisting of 13841 
  games, on my laptop with a PentiumIII mobile processor with
  800MHz, and Windows 2000:

  Pattern:      empty   (A) as   (B) as   low chin.
                board   above    below    fuseki

                3sec     2sec     5sec     2sec

  Here pattern (B) is 
  
      XO
      OX

  which produces a *lot* of matches (137051 hits, to be precise).

* The name 'Kombilo' is the Esperanto word for comb, and since
  'going through the game records with a fine-toothed comb'
  is a suitable description of what the program does, it seemed
  quite fitting. I hope that it's also easy to remember.
  Pronunciation: 'i' as 'ee' in see, and the stress is on the 'i'.