Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 19:14:32 06/21/00
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On June 21, 2000 at 17:23:13, blass uri wrote: >On June 21, 2000 at 16:17:12, Enrique Irazoqui wrote: > >>On June 21, 2000 at 15:55:37, Steffen Jakob wrote: >> >>>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. >> >>Why? The bishops are hopelessly confined by a static structure of pawns. To me, >>to us, it looks immediately the same as in the first position. Why not to a >>program? (Have mercy, I'm not a programmer) But even if it's not the same case, >>in my opinion it is worth teaching programs about this sort of things, or >>otherwise they will keep playing as dumb as the human opponents wants them to >>play, as it happened in Holland. >> >>Enrique > >The reason is very simple in the first position the rook has no squares to move >without being captured when in the other positions it is not the case. > >Stefan explained it clearly and you do not have to be a programmer to understand >it. > >You can say that the bishops are hopelessly confined by a static structure of >pawns but it is not a clear definition when saying that the rook cannot move >without being captured is a clear definition. > >Uri Or imagine a case where your "poor" bishop is constrained to 3 squares, d5, e4 and f3. With the opponent's king at g1 this bishop might be a real problem. with the king at b1 the bishop might be worthless even though it is trapped in the middle of the board. This kind of thing is (a) hard to detect; (b) expensive to detect; (c) might slow you down enough that you detect the bad bishop, but you miss important tactics somewhere else. It is not easy to balance this well.
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