Glaurung: One more attempt...

[Tord Romstad]

Andreas, Kenny and others have reported problems loading other UCI engine's in Glaurung's GUI. This has puzzled me greatly, because I have not been able to reproduce the problem myself, and the logs I have seen haven't really displayed anything useful.

I have now made yet another attempt to fix it. If it still doesn't work, I'm afraid I'll have to give up and let somebody else try to fix it. I would appreciate if some Mac users (preferably both Tiger and Leopard users) could test this new GUI version:

http://www.glaurungchess.com/beta/Glaurung21.dmg

As an extra bonus, the development version Glaurung 080516, which I believe is stronger and more aggressive than Glaurung 2.1, is also bundled with the GUI.

I'm still looking for someone to design a good-looking application icon. If someone has any idea where I can find someone who does such work relatively cheaply (I don't want to spend a lot of money on it; since my program is free), I would be happy to hear your advice.

Tord

[Guetti]

Andreas, Kenny and others have reported problems loading other UCI engine's in Glaurung's GUI. This has puzzled me greatly, because I have not been able to reproduce the problem myself, and the logs I have seen haven't really displayed anything useful.

I have now made yet another attempt to fix it. If it still doesn't work, I'm afraid I'll have to give up and let somebody else try to fix it. I would appreciate if some Mac users (preferably both Tiger and Leopard users) could test this new GUI version:

http://www.glaurungchess.com/beta/Glaurung21.dmg

As an extra bonus, the development version Glaurung 080516, which I believe is stronger and more aggressive than Glaurung 2.1, is also bundled with the GUI.

I'm still looking for someone to design a good-looking application icon. If someone has any idea where I can find someone who does such work relatively cheaply (I don't want to spend a lot of money on it; since my program is free), I would be happy to hear your advice.

Tord

Yay, yay! It works. Tested with Fruit 2.3.1 and Toga 3.1.2SE.
What did you change?

PS: I have another question though. The tournament levels are always greyed out in the Glaurung GUI. Like 40 Moves in 20 Minutes etc. Are these not implemented yet?
Also it would be nice to have some more freedom by setting a custom time control.

[Dr.Wael Deeb]

It looks like Arena is counting it's last days

[Tord Romstad]

Yay, yay! It works. Tested with Fruit 2.3.1 and Toga 3.1.2SE.

Great! Thanks for having the patience to test once again, after so many failed attempts.

What did you change?

Difficult to explain without posting lots of code which is far too ugly to deserve to be seen on a public message board, but it was a timing problem, as I expected. I am still not sure why I didn't see it on my computer, but my current hypothesis is that it's related to me having fewer CPU cores (I have 2, you have 4, Kenny has 8).

PS: I have another question though. The tournament levels are always greyed out in the Glaurung GUI. Like 40 Moves in 20 Minutes etc. Are these not implemented yet?

You are right, they are not implemented yet. I was too lazy to do it early, because I never use such time controls myself, but put the menu items there in order to remind myself that I should add such time controls later. Perhaps it's time to do it.

By the way, I don't understand why people are still using X moves / Y minutes time controls today. The discontinuity after X moves is very artificial and inelegant, and in my opinion the only reason such time controls even exist is that it was technically difficult to use time controls with increment before we had digital chess clocks.

Also it would be nice to have some more freedom by setting a custom time control.

Could you be a little bit more specific about what you want (in addition to X moves / Y minutes, that is)?

Tord

[Tord Romstad]

It looks like Arena is counting it's last days

I don't know about that, but if it is, it has nothing to do with me or my GUI. Arena and my GUI don't even run in the same operating system, and they are probably written with entirely different purposes in mind. They wouldn't be competitors even if Arena existed for Mac OS X.

Tord

[Dann Corbit]

Yay, yay! It works. Tested with Fruit 2.3.1 and Toga 3.1.2SE.

Great! Thanks for having the patience to test once again, after so many failed attempts.

What did you change?

Difficult to explain without posting lots of code which is far too ugly to deserve to be seen on a public message board, but it was a timing problem, as I expected. I am still not sure why I didn't see it on my computer, but my current hypothesis is that it's related to me having fewer CPU cores (I have 2, you have 4, Kenny has 8).

PS: I have another question though. The tournament levels are always greyed out in the Glaurung GUI. Like 40 Moves in 20 Minutes etc. Are these not implemented yet?

You are right, they are not implemented yet. I was too lazy to do it early, because I never use such time controls myself, but put the menu items there in order to remind myself that I should add such time controls later. Perhaps it's time to do it.

By the way, I don't understand why people are still using X moves / Y minutes time controls today. The discontinuity after X moves is very artificial and inelegant, and in my opinion the only reason such time controls even exist is that it was technically difficult to use time controls with increment before we had digital chess clocks.

Also it would be nice to have some more freedom by setting a custom time control.

Could you be a little bit more specific about what you want (in addition to X moves / Y minutes, that is)?

Tord

Personally, I like X moves in Y hours + increment.

I often run 40 moves in 2 hours + 30 seconds per move.

I also use 10 moves in 2 hours then 20 moves in 2 hours then 40 moves in 2 hours then 90 minutes for the rest of the game when I want to analyze openings (the information is exponentially more important towards the beginning, but I still want to see if a clear advantage is developed.

The nice thing about an X moves in Y minutes + increment format is that a big fail high or fail low can get a large time slice to resolve it clearly, and there is also reward for making truly obvious moves quickly and if you give an increment as well, the engine will never be in total lightning peril.

[Uri Blass]

Yay, yay! It works. Tested with Fruit 2.3.1 and Toga 3.1.2SE.

Great! Thanks for having the patience to test once again, after so many failed attempts.

What did you change?

Difficult to explain without posting lots of code which is far too ugly to deserve to be seen on a public message board, but it was a timing problem, as I expected. I am still not sure why I didn't see it on my computer, but my current hypothesis is that it's related to me having fewer CPU cores (I have 2, you have 4, Kenny has 8).

PS: I have another question though. The tournament levels are always greyed out in the Glaurung GUI. Like 40 Moves in 20 Minutes etc. Are these not implemented yet?

You are right, they are not implemented yet. I was too lazy to do it early, because I never use such time controls myself, but put the menu items there in order to remind myself that I should add such time controls later. Perhaps it's time to do it.

By the way, I don't understand why people are still using X moves / Y minutes time controls today. The discontinuity after X moves is very artificial and inelegant, and in my opinion the only reason such time controls even exist is that it was technically difficult to use time controls with increment before we had digital chess clocks.

Also it would be nice to have some more freedom by setting a custom time control.

Could you be a little bit more specific about what you want (in addition to X moves / Y minutes, that is)?

Tord

I do not see a problem with X moves/Y minutes

I think that fischer time control is not needed because it is only a private case of X moves/Y minutes when X=1

40/120+20/60 forever was used in the past in chess games many years ago.

Today the common time control is 90 minutes per game+30 seconds per move
90+30 is practuiically 1/90+1/0.5 forever

You can see that there was no reason to invent the fischer time control because everything was a private case of the system that was used in the past.

If your program can use X(1)/Y(1)+X(2)/Y(2) forever then by definition it can also use fischer time control as a private case.

Uri

[David Dahlem]

Any chance for a Windows version of the development version Glaurung 080516?

Regards
Dave

[Tord Romstad]

Any chance for a Windows version of the development version Glaurung 080516?

I'm afraid not, at least not available to the public. Technically, it wouldn't be difficult to let someone compile a Windows binary, but I don't want to release a new official or semi-official version just a couple of days after people have started testing Glaurung 2.1 seriously. Unless some extremely serious bug is found in Glaurung 2.1, the earliest possible release date for a new Windows version of Glaurung is some time shortly after the IOPCCC in the last weekend of June.

In case someone is curious: The only difference between Glaurung 2.1 and Glaurung 080516 is that 080516 evaluates space (by a simple formula which just awards a bonus based on the number of empty, safe squares for the minor pieces on ranks 2-4, and on the locations of the central pawns). My belief that 080516 is stronger is based on a self-play match between the two versions, which 080516 won by a very significant margin. Self-play tends to exaggerate the difference between two engine versions which differ only by an evaluation term, so I don't expect 080516 to be that much stronger against other engines, but it is almost certainly at least a little stronger.

Tord

[Tord Romstad]

PS: I have another question though. The tournament levels are always greyed out in the Glaurung GUI. Like 40 Moves in 20 Minutes etc. Are these not implemented yet?

Just finished implementing it now, and updated the beta version on my web site. There are some limitations: Custom X moves / Y minutes time controls are not yet supported, you can only use the predefined ones found in the menu. You also can't use such time controls in engine vs engine matches. Adding this is technically easy, but boring, because I have to edit a few dialog boxes and connect the UI interface elements to various parts of th code. I'll see if I find time to do it in the weekend.

I haven't tested X moves/Y minutes very thoroughly. The bad thing about not having implemented it for engine vs engine play yet is that I was forced to play against Glaurung myself in order to test, and was faced with the non-trivial challenge of surviving for more than 40 moves before getting mated. I barely managed this, and was mated at move 43.

Tord