Author: Tord Romstad
Date: 07:26:35 03/02/05
Go up one level in this thread
Hi Paul, Gothmog is my old engine, which has been in development for several years. It is big, horrendously complicated, and very buggy. The source code is ugly and almost completely unreadable. During last year I finally resigned myself to the fact that the program was far beyond salvation, and that to continue working on it would be a waste of time. Glaurung is a completely new project, started early in the autumn last year. The current version is still a very basic and minimalistic chess program. It is designed to be simple, clear, and compact. I have made an effort to keep the code and data size small, even when there is an expense in terms of speed. I also try to keep the code and data structures sufficiently general to handle board shapes and sizes different from the rectangular 8x8 board. There is a (not yet public) version of Glaurung which plays Glinski's hexagonal chess. Unlike Gothmog, Glaurung is an open source program. On March 01, 2005 at 14:53:29, paul bedrey wrote: >I know they are both UCI. Yes. Gothmog also supports xboard/Winboard, while Glaurung is UCI only. >I assume Gothmog is stronger since it has been around longer although I've seen >a list that reports Glaurung as about 2550 which is where Gothmog was. At fast time controls, Glaurung is definitely stronger. At slow time controls, there is some evidence that Gothmog might still have an edge, although there is not yet enough data to be entirely sure. I hope the next Glaurung version will be clearly stronger at all time controls. The two programs have somewhat different strengths and weaknesses. Glaurung is tactically faster, but has much less chess knowledge (especially in the endgame). >My question concerns style. Does Glaurung play the same aggressive style as >Gothmog? I definitely want Glaurung to play the same aggressive style as Gothmog, but the very low popularity of Glaurung compared to Gothmog indicates that I have not quite reached this goal yet. The reason is probably that Glaurung still lacks too much chess knowledge. To some extent, it is possible to tune Glaurung's aggressiveness by modifying the "King safety weight" parameter. Higher values should result in more aggressive play. By the way, I am not at all sure that the default value of this parameter is the strongest. Tord
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.