Author: James Lank
Date: 04:04:32 03/31/99
IM Larry Kaufman wrote a fascinating article on the evaluation of material imbalances in the March Chess Life. To make a long article short, he did some database crunching and came out with new numerical values for the pieces, when taking into consideration other factors (for example the value of bishop over knight is greater when the bishop is part of the bishop pair, or Q+N is worth slightly more than Q+B, but that advantage disappears if there are also rooks on the board, etc.) Some of this has been common knowledge among stonger players (i.e. most stonger players know the value of having a pawn + bishop pair for the exchange), but some of his conclusions were startling to me (a correspondence master); perhaps not so startling to IM and GM level players. This strikes me as useful knowledge as a chessplayer, but it also seems that it would be invaluable information to put into chess programs. Has this concept been implemented to any great degree in top level programs? Jim Lank
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