Glaurung

Glaurung is a fictional character in J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional Middle-earth legendarium. He is introduced in The Silmarillion as the first of the Dragons. He is also the main antagonist, along with Morgoth, in The Children of Húrin. He was known as The Deceiver, The Golden, The Great Worm and the Worm of Greed.

Characteristics

Glaurung was a very powerful dragon, if not the most magical. According to Tolkien, he sired the rest of his race, or at least the brood of Urulóki, wingless fire-breathing dragons. He was bred by Morgoth from some unknown stock and was the first dragon to appear outside of Angband.

In 455 First Age Glaurung led the attack of fire that defeated the Noldorin Elves and their allies and broke the Siege of Angband in the Battle of Sudden Flame, the Dagor Bragollach. In 472 during the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, Nírnaeth Arnoediad, Glaurung led the final reserve and the beasts of Angband in an attack that prevented the joining of the two Elven-hosts, breaking and routing the Host of the sons of Fëanor, resulting in the total defeat of the Union of Maedhros. During this battle Glaurung was stabbed in his vulnerable belly by the Dwarf-king Azaghâl and fled back to Angband.

Stockfish (chess)

Stockfish is an open sourceUCI chess engine, available for various desktop and mobile platforms. It is developed by Tord Romstad, Marco Costalba, Joona Kiiski and Gary Linscott, with many contributions from a community of open source developers.

Stockfish is consistently ranked first or near the top of most chess engine rating lists and is the strongest open source chess engine in the world. It won the unofficial world computer chess championships in 2013 and was a runner-up in 2014 and 2015. It is derived from Glaurung, an open source engine by Romstad.

Features

Stockfish can use up to 128 CPU cores in multiprocessor systems. The maximum size of its transposition table is 1 TB. Stockfish implements an advanced alpha-beta search and uses bitboards. Compared to other engines, it is characterized by its great search depth, due in part to more aggressive pruning and late move reductions.

Stockfish supports Chess960, which is one of the features that was inherited from Glaurung. The Syzygy tablebase support, previously available in a fork maintained by Ronald de Man, was integrated into Stockfish in 2014.