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Subject: Re: The correlation between Standard and Chess960 is not parallel

Author: Tord Romstad

Date: 03:39:35 06/28/05

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On June 28, 2005 at 03:26:12, Reinhard Scharnagl wrote:

>10x8 chess also compatibly is leaving the old ways of chess programming
>moreover having about 25% more moves in each ply of computing, which might be
>a good way to approach to Go programming later.

I used to think so, too, but my experience with hexagonal chess has made me
change my mind.  My program plays both games, using the same source code
(with a few tiny differences).  The games are similar, except that the average
number of legal moves is about 2.5 times bigger in hexagonal chess.  I expected
this to be a major problem, but it turns out that it isn't.  The search
techniques
from classical chess work just as well in the more complex game of hexagonal
chess.  Of course the bigger branching factor makes it impossible for the
program to search quite as deeply as in classical chess, but this is a problem
for human players as well.

The really hard thing about go and shogi compared to chess (from a
programmer's point of view) is the difficulty of writing a good evaluation
function.  In chess, material is much more important than everything
else.  You can play chess well without doing much more than counting
material.  In go or shogi, you will have to work really hard to produce
an evaluation function which works as well as a material-only eval in
chess.

Tord



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