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Subject: Re: Simon

Author: Tord Romstad

Date: 13:52:31 01/26/05

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Hi Dan,

I no longer post to this forum very often, because I prefer the (in my opinion)
friendlier atmosphere and better singal/noise ratio of the Winboard Forum.  But
in
this particular case, because my engine and its source code is mentioned, I will
make an exception:

On January 26, 2005 at 15:41:36, Dan Honeycutt wrote:

>From posts below and some emails it seems several in this forum were not aware
>of Simon.  A while back when Tord released Glaurung (with source code) there was
>a lengthy discussion in the winboard forum of the pro's and con's of open-source
>programs.  Tord stated that future versions of Glaurung may be "swap ware" - the
>source would be available to open-source authors, persons like Dann Corbit with
>a long history of contributions to computer chess, and closed-source authors as
>a source code swap.  I really liked Tord's idea as a means to share ideas
>between authors and keep the source out of the hands of those who only want to
>create a clone.  The only downside is that it leaves beginners out in the cold.

I have thought about the same problem, and I have not yet arrived at a
conclusion
about what to do.  But perhaps the problem for beginners isn't that bad.  After
all,
they still have simple programs like TSCP to study.  This should be sufficient
to enable
them to produce their own simple (and possibly slow, buggy and very weak)
engine.
When they have reached this stage, they can join the hypothetical swapware
community and get access to the source code of stronger chess engines.

At the moment, Glaurung is still open source.  A new version, 0.1.7, was
released
earlier today.  This version should be much stronger than 0.1.5 (the first
version
with public source code), and actually seems to be a bit stronger than Gothmog
(my older engine).

>To that end I created Simon.  I took my program Bruja and stripped out all the
>whistles and bells.  In particular, the search and evaluation are very basic.  I
>left in the fen parser, move generator, rotated bitboard stuff and all the other
>"nuts and bolts" needed for a program to work.  I went through the code and
>tried to make it as clean and clear as I could (though Dann has already rung me
>up on a couple of cases where I could have done better).  And I added extensive
>comments.

In fact, I have been considering something very similar.  I have thought about
releasing a "Glaurung Light", an extremely simplified and hopefully easily
understandable version of the engine.

Tord



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