Author: Steffen Jakob
Date: 12:55:37 06/21/00
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On June 21, 2000 at 15:14:54, Enrique Irazoqui wrote: >Do you have to treat differently the cases of blocked rooks or blocked knights >and bishops? So many times I hear programmers looking for patterns. Well, this >is one, isn't it? In the first position, the rook can't move or a pawn will take >it. In the second and third, the bishop is statically trapped by a chain of >pawns in a small corner of the board. Technical question from an illiterate: >wouldn't it make sense to heavily penalize such positions? But there is a big difference between those examples. In the first one the rook is already paralyzed. He has no moves to secure squares. You can see this statically by looking at the squares which he can reach and examine if the opponent attacks them. In the other examples the bishops have some squares which they can move to but they cannot reach the "interesting" part of the board. This is of course much harder to detect than the first case and cant hardly be done in reasonable time. [...] >>Sometimes I wonder if adding this kind of knowledge is worth the trouble, as >>there are so many exceptions, and even cases where the knowledge is counter >>productive, or is not triggered at the right time! > >These positions come from real games, one of them from a computer game, so I >guess it must be productive to teach them this kind of things. I may be >exaggerating, but looking at some human-computer games, like the ones lost by >Fritz in the Dutch championship, it seems clear that blocking positions is an >efficient anti-computer strategy. But how can a program recognize a general >blockade if it's incapable of realizing that one piece is trapped? For me it's always worth the trouble to implement things which other engines dont know. >In my opinion, this also has to do with a more general issue of aesthetics, of >programs being able to produce some sort of beauty other than announcing mate in >128. I appreciate your opinion very much! Best wishes, Steffen.
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