Author: Robert Henry Durrett
Date: 06:48:10 08/27/98
In the threads "CSTal Win95 needs only 62 seconds to reject Qxg7 , so what ? " and "So What?", there is a discussion related to this topic. In the past, there have been many comments in the chess literature to the effect that it is easy to win against a chess engine simply by starting an attack. The engine, supposedly, cannot see far enough ahead, so gets whipped. One would suppose, based on the above assumption, that chess engines would also be poor attackers, also for the same reason, that they could not see far enough ahead. But, in the above threads, it appears that the engines being discussed [Crafty, etc.] do find the positional preconditions for attack, [&, presumably, also sense danger in the same way] and make moves based on the programmer's desire for his engine to find an attack. Presumably, if an engine senses that the preconditions for attack are present, it's programming might cause it to look deeper into attack lines. Similarly, if an engine senses that some but not all of the conditions for attack are present, then it could be programmed to search for ways to cause the remaining preconditions to become met. [This is positional chess!!!] For defense, the above two paragraphs apply except that preconditions for an enemy attack are detected and the engine might be programmed to search for ways to eliminate the preconditions [also positional chess!!!]. The above merely speculates on what engines might do. So, the question is: To what extent do existing chess engines do the above? Are modern chess engines quite good at attack and defense? If so, what are the real reasons for that? Just curious.
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