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Subject: Re: Chess program improvement project (copy at Winboard::Programming)

Author: Stuart Cracraft

Date: 16:15:05 03/07/06

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On March 07, 2006 at 15:38:40, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On March 07, 2006 at 00:34:48, Stuart Cracraft wrote:
>
>>On March 07, 2006 at 00:31:45, Dann Corbit wrote:
>>
>>>On March 07, 2006 at 00:27:43, Stuart Cracraft wrote:
>>>[snip]
>>>>Very interesting indeed. A clever test.
>>>>
>>>>If one's results do not rotate approximately as described
>>>>for the four positions and you say the evaluation is an
>>>>issue, what kinds of evaluation issues have you seen that
>>>>could explain it?!?
>>>
>>>The most common thing that I see is something that is good for white being
>>>counted as positive for black also on the evaluation.  Often, when we are
>>>writing the eval, we are thinking from the perspective of white. And so if we
>>>are not very careful, we may invert the sign of some evaluation component and
>>>count something that is good for white as something that is good for black (or
>>>vice versa, though the reverse is seen less often for some reason).
>>>
>>>There are, of course, many other possible causes besides that.
>>
>>A good point. I try to avoid that by always doing things from the
>>side on move, almost always. There are a few in there however with
>>respect to white and black specifically, but they are then folded
>>together with the stm variable and stm^1 which translate to white/black
>>or black/white depending on who's on move. I could try this: rerun
>>your rotation test with successively less in the evaluation table
>>until nothing but material and see what happens.
>>
>>Stuart
>
>Let me toss in that we are talking about apples and oranges at the moment.  WAC
>is not about evaluation very much.  It is mostly about finding mates or
>significant material wins, and there your evaluation isn't much help so long as
>it knows how to add up the values of pieces...
>
>getting WAC solved quickly is really about tactics, extending the right things,
>and trying to avoid extending the wrong things...

But an asymmetric evaluation function could unbalance the search
sufficiently to cause an issue, no?



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