Friday, October 28, 2005

Wrong SGF

What's wrong in this picture? (from a commented game by Cornel - no idea which SGF editor was guilty of this). Every time I think I have seen it all, something new comes up. I was wondering why my "automatic branch annotation" put five letters on top of eachother. Must be a bug, right?

Nope, there are in fact five branches with the same starting move! (Q12). This is a perversion of the whole concept of branching - and most likely even illegal SGF, a pity there are SGF editors out there that allow this sort of thing.

Moyo Go Studio gracefully handles bad SGF. It never gives an error when it reads stuff that's invalid SGF, as long as it's unambiguous and renderable. But this is the weirdest thing I've seen in a while.. Of course, those five branches should start on move Q12, not M3! Not Cornel's fault by a long shot - it's us SGF editor writers that have to shape up.