Glaurung 2 - epsilon/5

[Tord Romstad]

Hello folks,

As some of you may have noticed already, Glaurung 2 - ε/5 has been available from my site since yesterday night. This isn't a very exciting update, unless you happen to be using an Intel Macintosh. The Macintosh executable is now compiled with the Intel compiler, and is a lot faster than the GCC compiled executable of the previous version.

The most important change in the code is that I have tried to fix a bug reported by Werner Schüle: Glaurung lost several CEGT games on time just before giving mate (which is of course an unfortunate moment to lose on time). Another change worth mentioning is that the parallel search has been made slightly more efficient; on my computer the speed has improved by about 10% with two search threads. I have some hope that the improvement will be bigger on systems with 4 CPUs, but I haven't had the chance to verify this.

For the other (very minor) changes, have a look at the Readme.txt file.

For those of you who produce rating lists: It probably isn't worth the effort to start your tests from scratch with Glaurung 2 - ε/5. It's basically the same as version 2 - ε/4, with just a few little bug fixes and microscopic enhancements. I am almost 100% sure the new version is no stronger than the old (unless you use a Macintosh with an Intel CPU, of course). If your rules allow it, please just silently replace 2 - ε/4 with 2 - ε/5, and let the new version inherit the rating of the old.

This will probably be the last version for a while, unless there are some very ugly bugs. From now on, I'll concentrate on writing a half decent evaluation function (the current one is terrible), add back most of the features from Glaurung 1.x, and try to complete my GUI. I expect the final 2.0 version to be ready some time during the autumn.

Tord