Glass 1.7 released!

[Pawel Koziol]

Glass 1.7 by Edmund Moshammer and Pawel Koziol is back at www.marittima.pl/glass

After a break of over one year I am glad to announce the release of Glass 1.7. Apart from a playing strength increase, Glass offers multiple personalities with different playing styles and strength ranging from 2400 Elo to outright suicidal. My personal favourite to play on a bad day is Ogre (weak, attack-minded, likes pawn storms) and to practice before an important game I'd pick Defender (strong, slightly passive, likes restraining opponent, goes out of its way to prevent opponent's attack). Please note that strength reduction features do not work with tournament compile and use them with "weak" version only!

The project has been dormant for many months, but then things begun changing at a rapid pace. First of all, several bugs have been fixed (see glass.pdf for gory details). Then a general code cleanup came, during which a few possibilities of improving the program were exposed. Current Glass uses simplified quiescence move generator (which gives a nice speed boost) and hybrid move ordering (history near the root, pcsq near the leaves).

At one point we took a risk of massive change of many eval parameters at the same time, in order to escape from a local optimum, which surprisingly worked. We also improved our testing methodology, using LittleBlitzer (thank you, Nathan Thom) to run ultra-fast games. Finally, Edmund enabled Glass to take advantage of 64-bit environment.

New version uses much more aggressive pruning than ever before, finally reaching some sort of equilibrium. Techniques that were disadvantageous at shallower depths finally started to bring dividends. In the last screening match previous version has been outsearched by 2 plies on average and got a sound beating (65,5%, corresponding to over 100 Elo difference).

Distribution packet comes with:

Glass_1.7 64-bit edition
Glass_1.7 tournament edition
Glass_1.7 weak edition
personality files
pdf document about Glass
opening book

In 2-3 weeks larger opening book will be released

Enjoy!

Pawel Koziol

[Olivier Deville]

Congrate Edmund and Pawel

The personality stuff looks really attractive.

Olivier

[Pawel Koziol]

If anyone experienced problem with "msvc4100.dll not found", the library is now present in the distribution folder, so please re-download. ops:

Pawel Koziol