Revolutionizing handheld chess: Glaurung 2 for the iPhone

[Tord Romstad]

Hi Tord!

Have you guys ever considered adding the UCI limit strength option to Stockfish?

We got exactly the same question by e-mail yesterday. This is what I replied:

Actually we already have that -- but currently only in the iPhone
version.

The only real problem of including it in the Stockfish UCI engine is
that it makes some parts of the code substantially more complex, ugly
and hard to read. Because Stockfish is an open source program, and
intended to serve not only as a program for end users, but also as a
starting point for people who want to do experiments with new chess
ideas in chess programming, keeping the source code as simple and
clean as possible is very important.

This doesn't necessarily mean that we won't ever add an adjustable Elo
feature, but only that we have to consider it carefully, and that we
can't make any promises right now.

[Lion]

Thats an amazing news !

Thank you very much for giving us such a great tool !

regards

[tomgdrums]

Hi Tord!

Have you guys ever considered adding the UCI limit strength option to Stockfish?

We got exactly the same question by e-mail yesterday. This is what I replied:

Actually we already have that -- but currently only in the iPhone
version.

The only real problem of including it in the Stockfish UCI engine is
that it makes some parts of the code substantially more complex, ugly
and hard to read. Because Stockfish is an open source program, and
intended to serve not only as a program for end users, but also as a
starting point for people who want to do experiments with new chess
ideas in chess programming, keeping the source code as simple and
clean as possible is very important.

This doesn't necessarily mean that we won't ever add an adjustable Elo
feature, but only that we have to consider it carefully, and that we
can't make any promises right now.

Hi Tord,

Thanks for the reply! I definitely see where adding that feature would cause problems for the other intentions that for which have created Stockfish.

Thanks again for a great engine!

[Mark]

I downloaded the 64-bit windows server, but haven't gotten it to connect yet. I added the port to the firewall exceptions, but I still get the "Unable to connect to server" error. Any ideas?

[Werewolf]

Tord you are an evil genius.

Well done, this looks amazing. I'm a 64 bit user and will wait but this is one of the most exciting things I've seen in ages.

Will the iPhone require wi-fi for this application to work or will 3G be ok?

[Tord Romstad]

I downloaded the 64-bit windows server, but haven't gotten it to connect yet. I added the port to the firewall exceptions, but I still get the "Unable to connect to server" error. Any ideas?

Almost certainly because your computer doesn't accept connections from the outside to that particular port number, for some reason. It might have something to do with network settings on your computer, with how the local network it's connected to is configured (if, for instance, this is a computer at your job and not a private computer), or restrictions imposed by your ISP.

I realize that this is not particularly helpful. You could try a wide range of different port numbers and see if you could get some of them to work, perhaps something in the range 49152-65535.

If someone with more network expertise reads this, I hope you can give some advice. The remote engine server is a plain TCP server which listens to connections on a port chosen by the user, port 1685 by default. The chess program running on the phone tries to connect to this port.

[Tord Romstad]

Tord you are an evil genius.

Well done, this looks amazing. I'm a 64 bit user and will wait but this is one of the most exciting things I've seen in ages.

No need to wait, unless you meant to say you were a 64-bit Linux user. The 64-bit Windows version is out, as I wrote a few posts back.

Will the iPhone require wi-fi for this application to work or will 3G be ok?

3G will be OK, and the amount of data used will be tiny.

[Werewolf]

Tord I keep getting the error message "Failed to connect to server. Please make sure the server is running and that the IP and port number are correct"

Not sure what I'm doing wrong. So far I've

- entered my IP address on the iPhone options
- run what the readme file told me to

UPDATE: Forget the above, it seems Glaurung doesn't like it cos I was using my home wi-fi to connect to my PC.
Running with wi-fi disabled did the trick. But now I notice after connection Glaurung is not using the PC to compute, but only the iphone. My PC is not doing any of the work!

[Tord Romstad]

Tord I keep getting the error message "Failed to connect to server. Please make sure the server is running and that the IP and port number are correct"

Not sure what I'm doing wrong. So far I've

- entered my IP address on the iPhone options
- run what the readme file told me to

UPDATE: Forget the above, it seems Glaurung doesn't like it cos I was using my home wi-fi to connect to my PC.
Running with wi-fi disabled did the trick. But now I notice after connection Glaurung is not using the PC to compute, but only the iphone. My PC is not doing any of the work!

Sigh. It would be nice if just once in life, some of the work I do would turn out to work for at least a tiny fraction of other users. It doesn't seem that it ever does. It's getting more and more tempting to keep it all private and just enjoy my programs myself.

If you want to help me investigate whether the problem is on the server side or on the client side (i.e. your phone), please drop me an e-mail or a PM, and I'll give you the IP address and port number for a server running on my machine.

And by the way, wi-fi vs 3G makes no difference.

[Max]

Hi,

Tord I keep getting the error message "Failed to connect to server. Please make sure the server is running and that the IP and port number are correct"

there are some freeware apps for your iPhone like this ping program. You could install it, enter the ip of your pc and test if you got a correct network connection. In the case you could not ping your server, than the problem is not related to GlaurungServer.

Good luck,
Max