Glaurung Mac OS X: New GUI, now with adjustable strength.

[Tord Romstad]

Hi all,

I have finally finished the Macintosh GUI version of Glaurung 2.1, which can be found on my web site. The GUI looks almost exactly like before, except that the moves are now animated (in the previous version, they just jumped instantly to their destination squares). However, there are a few changes under the hood:

1. Adjustable playing strength, in the range 1000-2500. The actual Elo numbers shouldn't be taken too seriously; they are poorly calibrated. The only data points I have are that Glaurung at 2500 seems to be slightly stronger than Hiarcs 11.1 (probably slightly weaker on 32-bit Macs), while Glaurung at 1600 is roughly comparable to TSCP 1.81. At 2200 and above, Glaurung plays exactly like at full strength, except that it is slower. Below 2200, it tries to emulate typical human tactical mistakes. I don't know how well it works, feedback is welcome.

2. Support for X moves / 40 minutes time controls.

3. Fixed a major bug which caused the program to crash on some machines when the user attempted to install a third-party UCI engine.

4. Lots of minor bug fixes.

In addition to Glaurung 2.1, the GUI also contains the development version Glaurung 080517, which I think is slightly stronger. Please note that in order to use the new adjustable strength feature, you'll have to use Glaurung 080517, it won't work with Glaurung 2.1.

Tord