The MSR format — overview

MSR (Morpion Solitaire Record) is a small, self-describing interchange format for games: the move list plus optional provenance, in either a compact MS1: envelope or plain JSON. It is designed to supersede the older Pentasol text format.

Why MSR

A record carries who/what/when produced a game (producer, author, method, seed, timestamps, search effort, tags) and a few derived facts, so a file is meaningful on its own.

Reusable library

The format is implemented by the standalone morpion-solitaire-record crate (imported as msr) — a reader, writer and validator with no dependency on any solver, so any tool can adopt it:

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
let record = msr::decode(text)?;   // MS1: envelope or raw JSON
msr::validate(&record)?;           // is it a legal game?
let compact = msr::encode(&record)?;
}

The normative definition is the specification and the JSON Schema. A Pentasol bridge is provided for migration.