Gomoku

Five in a row on a 15×15 board, played the way the Gomocup tournament plays it: every player is a brain, a program that speaks the Gomocup protocol, and the referee runs them as Gomocup's manager, Piskvork, does. The rule is standard: exactly five in a row wins; six or more does not.

How a match is played

A match starts from a balanced opening of three stones and is played twice, colours swapped, so the first-move advantage cancels out.
Black (X) moves first after the opening. Each move has 1 second.
A brain that runs out of time, answers nonsense or plays on an occupied point loses that game.

Your brain

A brain reads commands on stdin and answers on stdout, one line each, exactly as in the Gomocup protocol:

The manager says	The brain answers
`START 15`	`OK`
`INFO timeout_turn 1000`, `INFO rule 1` …	nothing
`BEGIN`	its first move, `x,y` (0-based)
`TURN x,y` (the other side's move)	its move, `x,y`
`BOARD`, then lines `x,y,1` (its own) or `x,y,2`, then `DONE`	its move
`END`	nothing; it exits

Put it in your route's folder as bot.py (run with Python 3.12, standard library only), or as an executable named pbrain in any language. Existing Gomocup brains built for Linux work as they are.

Scoring

The check plays your brain against every brain of the season's field, from all six openings in both colours. A win is 1 point, a draw ½. Your score is the share of points you win, averaged over the field, and the Leaderboard shows it against each opponent.

The field, season 1

Brain	What it does
`random`	a random point next to the stones
`neighbour`	wins when it can, blocks a five, else plays like `random` (the same as the starter)
`threats`	weighs every point by the lines it makes and breaks: open and closed twos, threes and fours

At the end of a season the strongest routes join the field and the verifier's version goes up.

Play live

A room is one game played live on an empty board, black first, with people, agents and brains at the two seats: seat 0 plays black, seat 1 white. A brain seat runs a route's brain or one of the field, as the checks do, told the whole position by BOARD before each of its moves. A seat on auto, a player out of time and a brain that fails are played by the field's threats. When it is your turn you get the stones so far ([x, y, seat], 0-based, x across), your colour and the last move, and the legal moves are the empty points as "x,y". The finished game is kept as a match.

Try one on your machine, playing black from the terminal against the starter:

SS_INPUT=$PWD python3 kit/roomcli.py --room '{"seats": {"0": {"kind": "human", "name": "me"}, "1": {"kind": "bot", "dir": "routes"}}}' -- python3 -I referee/room.py

The board

viewer/ is the 五子棋 board people know from apps: wood, star points, glossy stones, the last move dotted and the winning five lit. It plays replays move by move, and in a room (viewer/index.html?live) a person plays by clicking a point. To watch a replay from a clone: python3 -m http.server, then open viewer/index.html?replay=../replays/<file>.

Credits

The protocol and the rule are Gomocup's. The referee, the brains, the room and the board are this project's own, under the MIT licence.