Announcement: Official FMJD PDN 3.0 Standard

World Draughts Federation FMJD is proud to announce the official FMJD PDN 3.0 standard. This standard improves the exchange of draughts information and supports new technological developments such as electronic draughts boards. The FMJD congratulates and thanks the persons responsible for creating and reviewing this new standard, Wieger Wesselink and Rein Halbersma, for their work.

FMJD asks all federations to publish this news and put a permanent link to the webpage of the FMJD pdn 3.0 standard: http://pdn.fmjd.org so that current and future draughts software developers will be supported and encouraged to adopt this standard.

PDN 3.0 explained
The PDN 3.0 standard gives a formal definition of PDN, Portable Draughts Notation. It is more formal than previous versions in the sense that grammars are defined, and additional restrictions are documented. It also defines some extensions for setting up positions and for specifying clock times after a move in a game.

The http://pdn.fmjd.org website gives concrete implementations for 3 different parser generators (DParser, Grammatica, TPG) on 3 different platforms (C, Java & Python). Other parser generators with similar capabilities should also be able to accomodate this grammar. In particular, preliminary research suggests that the given grammar specifications in DParser, Grammatica, TPG are most likely also implementable with Bison/Flex, ANTLR or Boost.Spirit that are available on C/C++ platforms.

PDN 3.0 review process explained
The PDN 3.0 standard is the result of an open review procedure for which all known draughts programmers received a personal invitation and for which an open invitation was posted on the internet forums of ACF, FFJD, World Draughts Forum and other relevant websites. The review period started on October 1st 2011 and ended January 31st 2012. A discussion thread dedicated to the review process can be found here: http://laatste.info/bb3/viewtopic.php?t=3448 .

About the creator of PDN 3.0
The initiative for this standard came from Wieger Wesselink from The Netherlands. He made the pdn 3.0 draft to be reviewed and after the review implemented the required changes into the now adopted FMJD standard. Specialist Rein Halbersma from The Netherlands managed the review process and confirmed the new standard.