Due to fixes and refinements, you'll want to upgrade if you're using any previous release. Or, if you're using Cobra from a Subversion workspace, you can just update at any time and run install-from-workspace in the Source\ directory.
Discussion thread / Announcement
Download
See the ReadMe.text file after unzipping.
Btw if you're using Novell Mono, do not use version 2.2. It has one or more bugs which make it unusable with Cobra. Use 2.4+ or an earlier version such as 2.0.
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Have you played Arimaa?
I found a wonderful new game called "Arimaa". It's a turn-based game, vaguely similar to chess, with an 8x8 board and different classes of pieces. It's one of those well designed games that is rather easy to learn, but challenging to master. There are many aspects of the game to discover and explore; I've only just started.
Arimaa was actually created for AI research purposes in response to the defeat of world chess champion, Gary Kasparov, at the hands of IBM's Deep Blue chess computer. Arimaa has many more choices per turn and some other interesting properties. As a consequence, the best computer "bots" cannot currently defeat the best human players. There is a prize of $17,000 for the first bot that can. Naturally, I hope the winning bot will be written in Cobra. :-)
Omar Syed, the creator of the game, is a computer engineer trained in artificial intelligence. He runs a great site with instructions, wiki, forums, internet game room, bot API, etc. You can even order a physical game set.
Given Arimaa's design goal of challenging AI researchers, I was expecting that it might be boring, but it was just the opposite! Arimaa is fun in and of itself.
You can learn more about it at:
Arimaa was actually created for AI research purposes in response to the defeat of world chess champion, Gary Kasparov, at the hands of IBM's Deep Blue chess computer. Arimaa has many more choices per turn and some other interesting properties. As a consequence, the best computer "bots" cannot currently defeat the best human players. There is a prize of $17,000 for the first bot that can. Naturally, I hope the winning bot will be written in Cobra. :-)
Omar Syed, the creator of the game, is a computer engineer trained in artificial intelligence. He runs a great site with instructions, wiki, forums, internet game room, bot API, etc. You can even order a physical game set.
Given Arimaa's design goal of challenging AI researchers, I was expecting that it might be boring, but it was just the opposite! Arimaa is fun in and of itself.
You can learn more about it at:
Monday, March 16, 2009
Cobra March 2009 Help Wanted
Want to help with an open source project? Today's post on "Help Wanted" outlines a number of ideas that you might find interesting.
Sunday, March 08, 2009
Cobra February 2009 Update
February's update includes mixins, lambdas, constants and new documentation. Check out the Cobra February 2009 Update for more information. Or dive in now by getting the latest and exploring the docs and the wiki.
Sunday, March 01, 2009
Informal Releases
I've decided to start a lightweight process I call "Informal Releases" which can be made quickly and which leverage the existing install-from-workspace script. However, you don't have to use Subversion to get such a release. You just download a zip file.
Making such a release is much less work for me than an official one, so I expect to make 1 - 4 of these per month. They don't replace the future official releases such as Cobra 0.9, 0.9.1, 1.0, etc. But they do give you early access to new features.
This is for folks are not comfortable installing Cobra out of a Subversion workspace. It's easy enough to do, but users may prefer to download a hand-picked snapshot instead.
Another route could have been to fully automate the build of a nightly package, but then you don't know if you're downloading a stable package when it's blindly made at the same time every day. In contrast, I'll cut an informal release when I'm fairly confident that the Cobra source repository is stable and has something worthwhile to offer over the last one.
You can, of course, continue to use a Subversion workspace.
There is a discussion thread on this topic which includes the link to Cobra 2009-03-01.
Making such a release is much less work for me than an official one, so I expect to make 1 - 4 of these per month. They don't replace the future official releases such as Cobra 0.9, 0.9.1, 1.0, etc. But they do give you early access to new features.
This is for folks are not comfortable installing Cobra out of a Subversion workspace. It's easy enough to do, but users may prefer to download a hand-picked snapshot instead.
Another route could have been to fully automate the build of a nightly package, but then you don't know if you're downloading a stable package when it's blindly made at the same time every day. In contrast, I'll cut an informal release when I'm fairly confident that the Cobra source repository is stable and has something worthwhile to offer over the last one.
You can, of course, continue to use a Subversion workspace.
There is a discussion thread on this topic which includes the link to Cobra 2009-03-01.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Cobra January 2009 Update
January's work was all about refinements. Fixes, better error messages, more docs, etc. Check out the Cobra January 2009 Update for more information. Or dive in now by getting the latest and exploring the docs and the wiki.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
Cobra December 2008 Update
Cobra now supports extension methods on generic types, along with several refinements to the language and libraries. Check out the Cobra December 2008 Update for more information.
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