Glass 1.6 - New with Personalities!!

[Edmund]

Hello,

I am glad to announce the new Glass 1.6 by Pawel Koziol and Edmund Moshammer.

Besides bug-hunting, a great opening-book update and improving its tactical awareness by reducing the aggression with history heuristics, we invested a lot of effort into creating personalities.

At the moment Glass comes with 21 documented personalities at varying levels of strength. You can now choose to play against different personalities such as a 1500elo Coward or a 1800elo Punk (pathological Attacker). We suggest you load the engine using the UCI protocol, then you can select the personality in the options dialog. Otherwise using winboard, you can set the Personality option in "default.ini" (eg.: "Personality=Maverick")

We would be happy if you also shared your interesting personalities. Creating them is easy but can be very fun. You have 33 options available to tune the style and playing strength of the computer engine. Just create another *.ini file in the personalities folder like the other samples.

Also we would be very interested in your opinions on the playing strength of the current personalities. The Elo-classifications were set by many engine vs engine games and a couple of human vs engine games. But please tell us, should you think we are very much off the actual playing level for a certain personality.

The package can be downloaded as always on the Glass Homepage:
http://www.marittima.pl/glass

In the package you find 2 executables:
Glass_1.6_tourn.exe is used for tournaments only (not affected by most personality features)
Glass_1.6_weak.exe is used for personality play and thus slightly slower than the tournament version

regards,
Edmund

[Swaminathan]

the version 1.6 doesn't support analyze mode whereas the version 1.5 did support it. Could this be brought back? thanks.

[Pawel Koziol]

Swami,

I can run a game analysis under Arena using Glass 1.6 with no problems. One thing that might get wrong is caused by the fact that Glass supports both Wunboard and Uci protocols. If You are running it under Arena make sure that You manually set Glass to use UCI protocol. Default "Autodetect" invokes Winboard protocol, in which Glass is incapable of analysis.

regards,

pawel

[Hagen]

Any chance you'll support Chess960 for a future version?

[Swaminathan]

Swami,

I can run a game analysis under Arena using Glass 1.6 with no problems. One thing that might get wrong is caused by the fact that Glass supports both Wunboard and Uci protocols. If You are running it under Arena make sure that You manually set Glass to use UCI protocol. Default "Autodetect" invokes Winboard protocol, in which Glass is incapable of analysis.

regards,

pawel

thanks, I will try testing it tonight.

[Edmund]

Any chance you'll support Chess960 for a future version?

Hello Hagen,
sofar we haven't fully decided on the plans for the next release yet. I have the feeling Chess960 support should not be too difficult to add, but I will see what is possible.
regards,
Edmund

[Hagen]

Thanks. I would really appreciate it if you could add Chess960 support into Glass.

One other thing...you say we can create our own personality with this version. I'm highly intrigued by this but I need help understanding the ELO.ini settings. Especially the meaning of the different settings within a sample ELO.ini file. Once I understand this...then I'll be happily creating my own personality setting to use.

Plus there is another question I'd like to ask...when I select a personality...does this mean I have to select the ini file as well in Arena in order so Arena will adjust the play while using that ELO.ini setting?

[Pawel Koziol]

Thank You - all of You - for the kind reception of the new Glass. I have updated web page and distribution packet, including partial documentation of Glass in a pdf file.

Hagen, I hope this file answers some of Your questions referring to the personalities. Basically You should take one of the ini files, modify it and place it in the "personalities" folder, where it will be automatically detected and added to the list. Blindness options are the most important for strength, but also the most difficult to tune properly.

regards,

Pawel Koziol

[royb]

I would like to invoke glass (the weakened version) from the command line. How do I specify a non-default personality from the command line?

I run Linux and will use 'wine' to run glass inside eboard but I want a way to invoke it with a non-default personality from the command line.

Thanks!

[Edmund]

I would like to invoke glass (the weakened version) from the command line. How do I specify a non-default personality from the command line?

I run Linux and will use 'wine' to run glass inside eboard but I want a way to invoke it with a non-default personality from the command line.

Thanks!

Hello royb,

The current version doesn't parse any command-line arguments. This is actually a nice idea for a further release.
The only ways to load a personality now are either through the UCI mode ("setoption name Personality value ...") or in the default.ini ("Personality=...")

regards,
Edmund