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Subject: Re: Positional scores in Eval()

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 12:02:06 04/10/01

Go up one level in this thread


On April 10, 2001 at 12:04:17, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

>On April 10, 2001 at 10:25:02, Dieter Buerssner wrote:
>
>>On April 10, 2001 at 08:58:14, Ulrich Tuerke wrote:
>>
>>>On April 10, 2001 at 07:05:59, Tony Werten wrote:
>>>
>>>>On April 09, 2001 at 23:40:21, Jon Dart wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>>On April 09, 2001 at 17:04:09, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> An interesting thing is lazy evaluation, as the problems of it are
>>>>>> very similar to futility pruning.
>>[...]
>>>>>> My big question was: what score to return for example if evaluation in this
>>>>>> position is e and e+ 3.5 pawns <= alfa ?
>>>>>
>>>>>> Must one return alpha, estimated evaluation or evaluation+3.5 pawns,
>>>>>> when talking about e+margin <= alfa (idem story for e-margin >= beta) ?
>>>>>
>>>>>I return the estimated evaluation. But I fail to see that it makes a lot of
>>>>>difference. If it's below alpha, you're not going to propagate this evaluation
>>>>>up the tree, anyway.
>>>>
>>>>With failsoft alfabeta it easily could.
>>
>>
>>>I think that it is a bad idea to return the estimated eval here because it can
>>>result in some root-value far outside the aspiration window. It would be
>>>interpreted as a corresponding bound which may cause serious trouble (fail low
>>>in fail high verification search for instance).
>>>IMO, it's much safer to return the corresponding beta or alpha. In case of
>>>traversion of this value to the root this would cause a continous re-search
>>>(i.e. over a neighbour region of the original window).
>>
>>I also have thought about this problem. I am using fail-soft alpha-beta search.
>>I agree, that returning alpha or beta is safest. Nevertheless, some limited
>>testing has shown here, that returning an estimation solved the testpostions I
>>used with less nodes on average.
>>
>>From my understanding, returning an estimation should work and be theoratically
>>sound. In eval, I first check for cases, which I don't want to estimate, like
>>pawn endgames, endgames where one side has no pawns, etc. For other cases, I
>>more or less compute bound values.
>>
>>1)  material score + highest positional advantage seen for this side
>>2)  material score - highest positional advantage seen for the other side
>
>So i would need after a few ply a window
>
> materialscore + 20000
>
> materialscore - 20000
>
>pawn = 1000.

I think that big positional scores of +20 pawns or even +10 scores in the middle
game is a stupid thing to do.

2,3 or even 4 may make sense but I do not believe that +10 is logical.

You can talk about fortress position when 2 rooks adavantage are not enough to
win but even if your programs knows to evaluate fortress positions correctly
these positions are not relevant in the middle game when they are a lot of
unblocked pawns.

Uri



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