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Subject: Re: What's the difference between Glaurung and Gothmog?

Author: Matthew Hull

Date: 09:19:37 03/02/05

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On March 02, 2005 at 10:26:35, Tord Romstad wrote:

>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.


Does Glaurung use the same search strategy as Gothmog?  IIRC Gothmog uses
MTD(f), or is this incorrect?

Thanks,




>
>Tord



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