Author: Tord Romstad
Date: 17:43:32 02/09/05
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Hi Norm and Brice, I reply to your questions below, and I will also try to follow this thread a few more days and reply to any followup questions. Generally it is better to ask questions in the Winboard Forum, which I read more often. If you post here, there is a risk that I will not see it. On February 09, 2005 at 19:22:20, Norm Pollock wrote: >On February 09, 2005 at 17:35:07, Brice BOISSEL wrote: > >>Are you continue to working on Gothmog ? Yes, to a small extent. At least I intend to release a final 1.0 version, probably very soon. After that, I am not sure. I will definitely spend most of my time working on Glaurung and Scatha (Glaurung's twin brother, who plays hexagonal chess), but there is a small possibility that I will want to test whether some of the new ideas I get while working on Glaurung work in Gothmog as well. If the results seem interesting, it is possible that there will be new Gothmog versions even after 1.0. >>Is Glaurung the successor of Gothmog ? Yes. Gothmog was becoming too big, complicated and buggy, and it was very frustrating to work with the old and rotten code. In the end, the only possibilities were to start with a new program or to find a better hobby. >>Is Glaurung 0.21 stronger than Gothmog ? Glaurung is almost certainly stronger at blitz and bullet time controls. I think the same is true at slower time, but because I have very little data it is difficult to be certain. Neither engine will ever be very strong, though (although I have some hope that Glaurung will eventually become one of the strongest open source engines). Raw playing strength has never been (and never will be) my main goal. I am more interested in producing an interesting and entertaining style of play (and in this respect, Gothmog is perhaps still the better of my two programs). In Glaurung, I have the additional goal of making everything as small, simple and straightforward as possible. One of my reasons for making it open source is to serve as an example for beginners. I want to show that writing a chess program does not have to be difficult. You can do everything in the most straightforward and obvious way you can imagine, without worrying about speed or advanced chess knowledge, and still achieve a playing strength of well above 2000. Those who want a strong engine should look elsewhere. Glaurung is for those who likes to have every available UCI engine, those who wants something unsually aggressive, and those who would like to see that even slow, simple and stupid programs can play decent chess. >Another question. > >Do Glaurung and Gothmog share code? If so, how much? They share very little code. Less than 1%, I would guess, and nothing at all in the chess-related parts of the program. The few small pieces of shared code are found in interface functions (like polling for user input during the search). On the other hand, there are several important parts of Glaurung's code which can be considered as "translations" of the corresponding parts of Gothmog. Using exactly the same code is usually not possible, because of different data structures and design goals in the two programs. The most important examples of such translations are the evaluation of king safety and passed pawns, and the static exchange evaluation. In all cases, the code in Glaurung has been designed to be simpler, shorter and use less memory than in Gothmog. Tord
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