Shogi is a distant cousin of Chess. Unlike Chess, you may re-use captured pieces anywhere on the board anytime. It brings quite lot of additional complexities, and even after the defeat of Garry Kasparov in 1997, many considered that (at least top-level) human Shogi players have a great lead on computer Shogi engines.

The situation had changed dramatically when a newcomer Shogi engine called Bonanza, developed by a Japanese chemist Kunihito Hoki, won the 16th World Computer Shogi Championship. Bonanza appeared totally out of the blue — Hoki incorporated some new ideas developed in the field of computer Chess, and Bonanza beated existing engines with no mercy. Bonanza could even corner some professional Shogi players in 2007. Later Hoki released(but not strictly open-source) the source code of Bonanza, and the standard of computer Shogi has risen considerably since then. Finally, in the 1st Denousen last year, Kunio Yonenaga, long retired but possibly one of the greatest Shogi players in the history, was defeated by Bonkras, a clustered version of Bonanza developed by Eiki Itoh of Fujitsu.

The first match of Denousen this year was held yesterday between Kouru Abe, an 18-year old prodigy from Aomori, and Shueso, which finished in 5th at the 22nd World Computer Shogi Championship. I hoped a close game, but Abe could beat Shueso quite easily. Shueso somehow could not bring its ability into full play, to my great disappointment. Next weekend(Mar. 30), we will see the second match between Shinichi Sato, another young pro, and Ponanza, developed based on Bonanza by Issei Yamamoto of The University of Tokyo.

BTW, Debian already has the package of GPS Shogi, which won the 22nd World Computer Shogi Championship and considered by many the strongest Shogi engine available now (there is also gnushogi in Debian, but gnushogi is quite weak).

You may have fun with

    $ xshogi -fsp gpsshogi

Unfortunately, we don’t have good modern GUI for Shogi yet…

1. Check pkg-haskell repository whether your intended package already exists or not. Somebody might work on it already.

2. Find the webpage of your intended package at HackageDB, then download “Cabal source package”. Untar it. The tarball filename should be changed to fit the Debian source package convention. For example, if the original name is something like foobar-1.0.tar.gz, then it should be haskell-foobar_1.0.orig.tar.gz.

3. File ITP. reportbug is your friend.

4. Run cabal-debian in untared dir:

    $ cabal-debian --debianize --quilt
   

   We do have the upstream tarball, so use –quilt. See http://wiki.debian.org/UsingQuilt. It might give you warnings about changelog. debian/changelog doesn’t exist yet, so ignore it.

5. Now read

   http://wiki.debian.org/Haskell/CollabMaint/Processes

   and

   http://wiki.debian.org/Haskell/CollabMaint/PackageTemplate

   carefully. Then do things as they say. These two are short, but well-written instructions.

   Edit the generated debian/control appropriately. Do not forget to make your debian/copyright machine-friendly. See http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/.

6. Test whether your package is flawless and really buildable. Do lintian. Use pbuilder.

    $ lintian haskell-foobar_1.0-1_amd64.changes
   
    # pbuilder --build haskell-foobar_1.0-1.dsc
   

7. Read http://wiki.debian.org/Haskell/CollabMaint/DarcsBasic.

   Darcs is quite easy to use, and you don’t have to be the master of Darcs to merely debianize things anyway. Basically, what I usually do is

    $ darcs record -a; darcs push --repo=debian
   

   Darcs is well-suited to Haskell-related development, but seems you can use Git, too.

8. Change debian/changelog. “UNRELEASED” in the first line should be “unstable” or “experimental”. Do not forget to close ITP.

9. Finally, do

    $ debuild -tc; debcommit -r; debrelease; darcs push --repo=debian
   

   That’s all folks!

It rarely snows these days in Tokyo. Until now.