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Sente (from the Japanese せんて/先手) is a general-purpose open-source python library for the ancient chinese board game Go/Badok/Weiqi. Sente is designed to be a Python 3 replacement for the gomill library.

In addition to supporting Python 3, Sente is written in C++ which allows AIs that use Sente to take advantage of C++’s superior performance.

Installation & Requirements

Sente runs on any operating system with python 3.5, 3.8 and 3.9 and can be installed via pip.

$ pip install sente

– or –

$ python3 -m pip install sente

Getting Started

The Basic element in Sente is the sente.Game object which represents a Simple Game.

>>> import sente
>>> game = sente.Game()

By default, sente creates a 19x19 game with Chinese Rules. 9x9 and 13x13 board sizes and Japanese rules can be specified if desired.

note: japanese rules are not reccomended as sente does not currently include automatic dead stone removal.

>>> game = sente.Game(13)
>>> game = sente.Game(19, sente.rules.JAPANESE)

moves can be played on the game using the play() method, and the board can be printed using the python print() function.

>>> game.play(4, 4)
>>> game.play(16, 4)
>>> game.play(4, 17)
>>> print(game)

 1  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
 2  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
 3  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
 4  .  .  .  ⚫ .  .  .  .  .  *  .  .  .  .  .  *  ⚫ .  .
 5  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
 6  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
 7  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
 8  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
 9  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
10  .  .  .  *  .  .  .  .  .  *  .  .  .  .  .  *  .  .  .
11  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
12  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
13  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
14  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
15  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
16  .  .  .  ⚪ .  .  .  .  .  *  .  .  .  .  .  *  .  .  .
17  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
18  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
19  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
    A  B  C  D  E  F  G  H  J  K  L  M  N  O  P  Q  R  S  T

The Sente board display is designed to be similar to the gomill ascii boards output. A hash (#) denotes a Black stone and an “O” (O) denotes a white stone. One difference between sente and gomill is that in sente, the star points are denoted using an asterisk (*)

Finally, Sente also provides the ability to check if a move is legal using the is_legal() method

>>> import sente
>>> game = sente.Game()
>>> game.play(4, 4)
>>> game.is_legal(4, 4)
False

Building & Contributing

Sente uses CMake, git and C++11. In order to build the library, you will need CMake, and a C++ compiler that supports C++11. You can install these using a software package installer like homebrew or apt.

OSx

$ brew install git
$ brew install cmake
$ brew install clang++

Debian/Ubuntu

$ sudo apt-get install git
$ sudo apt-get install cmake
$ sudo apt-get install g++

A sente binary can be built by running the setup script.

$ python3 setup.py develop

To import the resulting .so file, simply import sente in a local python interpreter

$ python3 setup.py develop
$ python3

Python 3.8.10 (v3.8.10:3d8993a744, May  3 2021, 09:09:08)
[Clang 12.0.5 (clang-1205.0.22.9)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import sente
>>>

Building documentation

in order to build the documentation, you will need to have sphinx installed and build a development version of sente.

$ pip install -r requirements.txt # install sphinx
$ python setup.py develop # build a development version of sente
$ cd docs
$ make html # make the html

Indices and tables