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Subject: Re: Chess knowledge (eg: SOS)

Author: KarinsDad

Date: 14:56:34 03/31/00

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On March 31, 2000 at 12:16:28, Colin Frayn wrote:

>>You might be surprised at the knowledge even in tiny chess engines.  Look at >the very clever eval code in Phalanx, for instance.
>
>Substitute 'incomprehensible' :)
>I'm sure it's very clever, but it would take hours of work to find out what he's
>doing.
>
>I tried to put quite a bit of chess knowledge into ColChess, but it's not
>exactly the greatest analysis function ever written.  Hopefully it's
>comprehensible though as I used 8*8 arrays to store the pieces rather than
>bitboards or any of that nonsense :))
>(I hope Bob Hyatt isn't reading this)


Are you implying that bitboards are incomprehensible, or just incomprehensible
to you?


>
>I think that improving the static eval function would improve the performance of
>my program a lot more than slghtly tweaking its tactical speed.  I could
>convincingly argue with anyone who says otherwise.  Having said that... it's
>important to not lag _too_ far behind in sheer search depth simply because
>you'll get outplayed with tactics every time.


I have come to the conclusion that the best move is the best move is the best
move, regardless of how it is found. In other words, if a program is brilliant
at positional play, but only searches 8 ply deep, it could still conceivably
beat a program that searches 12 ply deep since it often makes moves that GMs
would make. I have this theory that good understanding of the principals of
chess would enable a program to automatically avoid the pitfalls of given
positions due to the avoidance of those positions in the first place (e.g. if
you program does not play a gambit, it never has to pick the pawn back up).

KarinsDad :)



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