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Subject: Re: The latest truth on chess ?

Author: Otello Gnaramori

Date: 12:18:29 07/08/01

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On July 08, 2001 at 14:49:59, Gordon Rattray wrote:

>No.  For many positions, it is difficult to evaluate them correctly.  It is
>anything but straightforward.  It is common for humans/computers to play towards
>a certain position, only to find that they had incorrectly evaluated it.  For
>example, playing for an attack or an endgame position that isn't as good as it
>appeared from afar.

Exactly. The example of the attack is perfect to explain my point :
Only after the calculus of "all" the possible variations you can decide which is
the best move to play.


>>King safety , doubled pawns , open files ,center domination etc. don't require a
>>special effort to be evaluated. The major effort goes into calculus of
>>variations, since IMO the evaluation of the goodness of the position is easily
>>understood (by the computers too).
>
>Easily understood?  You should either play for the world championship and/or
>start writing a chess program if you think that positional evaluation is
>straighforward...  ;-)  Why do you think that programmers keep adding more and
>more knowledge instead of just trying to get their programs to calculate deeper?
>
>Gordon
>

That's not exact, since the effort of the programmers IMO are also in efficient
search and propagation algorithms .
They aren't focused only in the improving of the eval function that is obviously
of key importance.
What I meant is that the main concepts behind the eval are known , there is
nothing special about that : king safety and so on...
The main power of programs against the human beings is to outplay the human
players in deep calculations.

Regards






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