Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 19:44:03 05/28/98
Go up one level in this thread
On May 28, 1998 at 18:42:10, Roberto Waldteufel wrote: > >My chess program currently has only a crude understanding of king >safety, but I would like to try to improve this. It is quite good at >finding a forced mate, especially if all of the moves by the mating side >are checks, but seems to lack the skill to build up sufficiently >aggressive positions to make full use of this ability. I know that most >programs measure king safety in some more or less complex way, but I am >not sure what is the best thing to measure in terms of information >usefulness per time spent. Maybe a very complex king safety function >with a hash table to cut down the overhead is the way to go, or pehaps a >fairly crude but fast scheme without hashing might be efective. At >present my program uses a count of attackers and defenders to guage king >safety, where I define (somewhat inaccurately) an attacker/defender to >be any piece or pawn that attacks a square adjacent to the king. Does >anyone have any better suggestions as to how to build into the >evaluation function the tendancy to move its pieces to the most >aggressive squares possible? > >Roberto this is very difficult to get "right"... but there are three issues you have to handle. 1. pawn structure around the king. open files are bad, half-open files are bad, any pawn moves around the king are bad (yes, even playing h3 for no reason is bad as it makes the black move g5-g4 a threat since there is a target sitting out there at h3. 2. pieces and how they are positioned to attack the king-side. This is very difficult, although simple "distance" can go a long way. 3. finally you have to handle the castled-on-same-wing problem that any move you make to attack the opponents king might also be a move that self- attacks your king since you can shred both kingsides at the same time, and then you'd better hope your pieces arrive there first...
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.