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Subject: Re: Sacrifices - eliminating them from the search?

Author: blass uri

Date: 09:27:22 03/12/00

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On March 12, 2000 at 10:09:41, Colin Frayn wrote:

>On March 11, 2000 at 15:03:58, John Coffey wrote:
>
>>I wonder how much benefit there would be to doing a dynamic exchange evaluation
>>on certain moves and just eliminating them from the search.  Remove moves that
>>seem to obviously lose material.   We might allow sacrifices at the base of the
>>tree and sacrifices that give check at any point.
>
>If you could just cut out moves which you played then that would be great, but
>overlooking good sacrifices that the opponent could make might seriously reduce
>your program's strength.  Remember that they will mainly be playing other
>programs, and other programs won't be so prejudiced against sacrifices as humans
>are.

I do not think that humans are prejudiced against sacrifices.

I had games in the past when I sacrificed my queen because I saw that if my
opponent takes the queen he or she is going to lose by checkmate.

I had a game like it also when I had only 1700 elo rating.

If you prune sacrifices you will miss these moves and you will have big problems
not only against computers but also against humans.

>
>By that I don't mean that humans hate playing sacrifices, just that they are
>naturally more prone to discounting them and missing purely tactical lines.  A
>computer will easily spot a clever checkmate which is initiated by a sacrifice
>without any problem at all, whereas a human often has great difficulty in doing
>so.

I disagree.
Strong humans often see good sacrifices.

They can do tactical blunders but most of them are not because of missing a
sacrifice but because of missing a tactical trick when there is no sacrifices in
it.

Uri



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