Glass 1.6 - New with Personalities!!

[Edmund]

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?

Hello Hagen,

I very much appreciate your interest in creating your own Glass personalities. If there are any questions don't hesitate to ask.

Pawel has just uploaded a new distribution file on the homepage. This time he included a documentation of all the different options. You might want to take a look in there.

Regarding the process of loading the personality:
- at programstart glass will load the default settings (these will be kept if no default.ini file is found)
- next it loads the default.ini file (overwriting the previous/default values)
- - if in the default.ini contains the "Personality=.." option, the according personality file is loaded

next Arena will send commands overwriting the previous values.
Arena will always send settings, if you have chosen some non-default values. So if you chose a personality in Arena it will overwrite the personality chosen in the default.ini. If you leave the default in Arena, it will send no command, nothing gets overwritten and the default.ini personality is used.

regards,
Edmund

[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!

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

Thanks for the reply. I'm still a bit confused though. In the glass_distrib directory there is a file 'default.ini'. Am I supposed to edit that file to include a line 'Personality=Raw.ini' (for example)? Or, is it better to copy Raw.ini from the personalities directory up to the glass_distrib directory and overwrite the file default.ini with the contents of Raw.ini (keeping the file name default.ini )?

I've tried the second option and it does not seem to work as the engine is way too strong for me (I'm about 1600) even when I copied 'Useless.ini' into default.ini.

Thanks for clarifying (again) for me!

[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

Thanks for the reply. I'm still a bit confused though. In the glass_distrib directory there is a file 'default.ini'. Am I supposed to edit that file to include a line 'Personality=Raw.ini' (for example)? Or, is it better to copy Raw.ini from the personalities directory up to the glass_distrib directory and overwrite the file default.ini with the contents of Raw.ini (keeping the file name default.ini )?

I've tried the second option and it does not seem to work as the engine is way too strong for me (I'm about 1600) even when I copied 'Useless.ini' into default.ini.

Thanks for clarifying (again) for me!

Hello royb,

The first problem is that when specifying the Personality in the default.ini file, you don't have to write ".ini" in the back. So when you write 'Personality=Raw.ini' it will actually look for a file: "personalities/Raw.ini.ini" which it wouldn't be able to find.

Next, when playing with personalities please make sure you use the "_weak" version. The tournament compile doesn't react on certain weakening options - this makes it faster and thus more competitive in engine vs engine play.

Finally it should also be possible to copy the contents of a personality file into default.ini, but this doesn't seem very convenient. Especially if you want to switch between the personalities every now and then. Apart from setting the Personality, the default.ini is rather used for more global settings like setting the hash-size or the nalimov-path.

regards,
Edmund

[royb]

I would like to express my thanks to the authors for an outstanding job! The "dumbed down" personalities are very nice and seem, after a few games, to roughly correspond to approximately what I would expect. I am roughly 1600 in strength and the 1200 opponent is easily crushed (as expected), the 1400 opponent usually loses fairly quickly against me while the 1600 opponent is a good struggle for me. The 1800 usually cleans up against me...

All seems roughly where it should be. I especially like the fact that the book knowledge varies with the strength of the opponent. That is usually not something addressed by engine authors!

Well done. I'm enjoying this a great deal.

Roy

[Hagen]

Glass 1.6 is now one my favorite engines to practice chess games with. Terrific.

[Pawel Koziol]

A sharp-eyed user of Glass 1.6 noticed that a couple of personality files in the range of 1600-1800 were missing , so I had to replace the distribution package. Engine is the same, glass.pdf and opening book marginally updated.

regards,

Pawel Koziol

[Lostark]

I am now sparring on a daily basis with the 1600-2000 guys in the Glass house on my DGT board...I must say I have enjoyed Engine chess after a long time ( after Tao - Yin 54 - 2004 A.D)
And its been a really good experience so far.
Can anyone suggest other good modern day engines that would mimic a 1800-2000 elo player somewhat similar to Glass guys ?
Thanks to authors Edmund Moshammer and Pawel Koziol, for such a fine program... you proved that mere Elo is not the USP of any engine (though I really like to see Glass up there in the elite group only for better publicity) .

[LucenaTheLucid]

While not near the 1800-2000 range, Golem is about 1600 ELO and plays a really very decent game. No opening book though, so you might want to mate it with Polyglot or something.

[royb]

I am now sparring on a daily basis with the 1600-2000 guys in the Glass house on my DGT board...I must say I have enjoyed Engine chess after a long time ( after Tao - Yin 54 - 2004 A.D)
And its been a really good experience so far.
Can anyone suggest other good modern day engines that would mimic a 1800-2000 elo player somewhat similar to Glass guys ?
Thanks to authors Edmund Moshammer and Pawel Koziol, for such a fine program... you proved that mere Elo is not the USP of any engine (though I really like to see Glass up there in the elite group only for better publicity) .

I have to agree. I've played these various personalities quite a bit and really like they way they "feel" as players. I also ran a match vs GNUchess 5.07 (known to be in the area of 2350 ELO) against Glass with the 2200 ELO personality. The results of that 25 game match (sure, it's short but enough to give a rough feel for whether the 2200 personality is even close to 2200 as measured against the 2350 GNUchess) showed that indeed, GNUchess won by a bit but very much in line with having just played a 2200 opponent.

Very nice job and many thanks to the Glass authors!

[Lostark]

Golem is about 1600 ELO

Thx Lucena... will try it out if its google-able; if not I'll have to take it from you

I also ran a match vs GNUchess 5.07

Hey Royb - does GnuChess also came in UCI flavor and is it available?
Also the winboard version was not working correctly in Winman engine manager... do you have to use any special cmd-line arguments?

Wonder why no one talks about the Thinker engines... I heard that they were unique but did anyone have any hands-on experience with thinkers that can be shared here?

Friendly regards
Lostark