Kudos to Tord on Glaurung for iPhone

[smcracraft]

It is well done, free, and strong.

Hats of to the wizard Tord!

Stuart

[Tord Romstad]

It is well done, free, and strong.

Hats of to the wizard Tord!

Thanks, but I'm afraid you won't be quite as happy when you start encountering the bugs and rough edges. There are some stability problems and freezes (especially at startup). I think these are fixed now, but getting an updated version through to the App Store takes a while (because Apple tests and reviews each new version before it's released).

There has also been a few reports of illegal moves. Most people (including myself) never see these, but for some people it seems to happen frequently. This is extremely frustrating: Fixing a bug you never encounter yourself is no easy task.

At least there should be a more stable and less buggy version ready for download within a few days, I hope.

Tord

[krazyken]

I would doubt the illegal moves claims until they send you the relevant pgn. There are many iPhone users who think en passant is illegal.

[Tord Romstad]

I would doubt the illegal moves claims until they send you the relevant pgn. There are many iPhone users who think en passant is illegal.

In some (perhaps even most) cases it is certainly the users who don't know the rules of the game. But I have one case of a user who seems very knowledgeable (as well as helpful and polite), who claims to have seen frequent illegal moves, and has even provided me with a screenshot. In principle it is of course possible that he has photoshopped the screenshot, but this seems completely absurd. I am fairly sure the program does make illegal moves in some situations, but in order to provoke the illegal moves you probably have to do some sequence of operations which I have never thought of trying.

This is why chess GUI programming is much more difficult than chess engine programming: A chess engine only has to handle a small set of clearly defined commands sent from the GUI. A GUI must be able to handle all the nearly infinite number of operations a human user can think or doing (or do by accident).

Tord

[smcracraft]

It is well done, free, and strong.

Hats of to the wizard Tord!

Thanks, but I'm afraid you won't be quite as happy when you start encountering the bugs and rough edges. There are some stability problems and freezes (especially at startup). I think these are fixed now, but getting an updated version through to the App Store takes a while (because Apple tests and reviews each new version before it's released).

There has also been a few reports of illegal moves. Most people (including myself) never see these, but for some people it seems to happen frequently. This is extremely frustrating: Fixing a bug you never encounter yourself is no easy task.

At least there should be a more stable and less buggy version ready for download within a few days, I hope.

Tord

Haven't noticed any problem at all.

It beats me every time.

Of course that's not saying very much but..

The price is right as Bob Barker would say...

Stuart

[trojanfoe]

I've just bought myself an iPhone 3g and have installed abaia and I have to say it's brilliant! Excellent work Tord!

Cheers,
Andy

[smcracraft]

I've just bought myself an iPhone 3g and have installed abaia and I have to say it's brilliant! Excellent work Tord!

Cheers,
Andy

Andy, I went to the App store but see no mention of "Abaia".

Glaurung is there in all its glory and I what I referred to.

Stuart

[Tord Romstad]

I've just bought myself an iPhone 3g and have installed abaia and I have to say it's brilliant! Excellent work Tord!

Cheers,
Andy

Andy, I went to the App store but see no mention of "Abaia".

Abaia is distributed through Cydia, for jailbroken phones. It is the version I recommend everyone to use if they can. It is updated with important bug fixes more quickly (because I can skip Apple's painfully slow review process for the App Store), and is likely to grow a few features in the future which I can't implement in the App Store version. Right now, Abaia is relatively stable, while Glaurung has several major bugs (which I have fixed, but I'm still waiting for the updated version to show up at the App Store).

The only good reason to run Glaurung is if you for some reason cannot or don't want to jailbreak your device.

Tord

[mcostalba]

while Glaurung has several major bugs

Hi Tord,

could you please post the bugs you fixed ?

Perhaps could affect also Stockfish.

Thanks
Marco

[Tord Romstad]

while Glaurung has several major bugs

Hi Tord,

could you please post the bugs you fixed ?

Perhaps could affect also Stockfish.

Hi Marco,

Sorry -- I should have been more specific. This was about GUI bugs, not engine bugs. Various crashes, freezes and excessive memory allocations when running on the iPhone.

Tord