Why Stockfish ?
- It's a fish
- It is produced in Norway and cooked in Italy. Indeed the biggest part of norvegian stockfish is exported in Italy where is lovely cooked.
What has this stockfish more then Glaurung 2.1 ?
Well, some bugs have been fixed, some possibly improvements have been scattered all along the code, in my private tests it seems stronger then Glaurung, expecially on 32 bit system.
But possibly the biggest change is a rewrite of large parts of Glaurung code. I am particulary proud of movegen.cpp where I was able to cut more then 250 lines of code through the use of templates, and now move generation is a little bit faster too.
So I would kindly ask you to properly compile it and to give it a try in public tests. I know clones are not allowed, but I would think this one could lead to some surprise.
Known issues
- As the original Glaurung 2.1, this engine is endian sensitive. Please read the README if you have a PowerPC Mac and you want to compile yourself.
- On 32 bit systems code must be compiled with -fno-strict-aliasing option, both under gcc and Intel C++ compiler, to avoid random crashes due to a pop_1st_bit() optimization. MSVC does not seem to have this problem.
Download
You can download sources from:
http://digilander.libero.it/mcostalba/sf_1.0.zip
Special thanks to Tord Romstad for his beautiful engine. It is very, very difficult to find a parameter that needs tuning. It seems everything has been througly tested and optmized.
It's a wonderful base to start off. If this engine, just few months of hacking, will demonstarte stronger then Glaurung it is mostly because of the very high quality of the original one.
Thanks
Marco