Gaviota 1.0 for Mac OS X (Release)

[michiguel]

Ported to Mac
https://sites.google.com/site/gaviotach ... 0formacosx

Thanks a lot to Julien for his help! It took a while to port this (actually, to figure out what the problems was remotely). Mac does not support unnamed semaphores and has its own version of spinlocks. Somehow named semaphores did not work, so I wrote my version to make it portable based on gcc builtin functions and conditional variables. It seems to work, let me know if there are problems using many cores. It should be fine, I hope.

Miguel

[Max]

Thanks Miguel and Julien!

I like Gaviotas active play and of course the smileys.

With xboard, do you advise using gaviota in uci mode with polyglot, or gaviotas winboard support with "gaviota -x"? Is gaviota.ini.txt in both cases evaluated?

-Max

[michiguel]

Thanks Miguel and Julien!

I like Gaviotas active play and of course the smileys.

With xboard, do you advise using gaviota in uci mode with polyglot, or gaviotas winboard support with "gaviota -x"? Is gaviota.ini.txt in both cases evaluated?

-Max

Gaviota was born as xboard/winboard, and has the spirit of it. So, given the option, it should be run as xboard (learning, resign, etc would work only on xboard). However, it terms of strength, it should be exactly the same. But, in certain situations, UCI may be recommended. For instance, Gaviota should be run as UCI in GUIs that have butchered or defective winboard support (Aquarium, for instance). In xboard and Arena, for sure xboard protocol is fine and probably recommended.

To run it as xboard, you do not need to include the '-x' switch, since xboard will pick it as xboard engine. When gaviota starts, it accepts both protocols and the GUI decides (the user through the GUI). The switch "forces" gaviota to be xboard (it won't accept the other protocol anymore). Same if it runs with the '-u' switch: it will force gaviota to be UCI. To be precise, the switch -x means "no uci" and -u means "no xboard".

gaviota.ini.txt will be always read, but if you choose options through the GUI, the latter will have priority and will override the ones in the ini file. It is perfectly valid to delete the ini file (or rename it) and handle the engine exclusively through the GUI.

Miguel