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Subject: Re: learning evaluation weights (was Re: Genetic algorithms for chess?)

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 11:49:07 05/25/98

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On May 25, 1998 at 11:19:46, Don Dailey wrote:

>
>>The 1,3,3,5,9 ratio has stood the test of time ...
>
>Has it really?   I don't think anyone believes these numbers are
>correct.  They are simply understood to be as close as you can get
>using integer values with the pawn being a single unit.
>
>> with the only other
>>significant one that I have seen is the one by Larry Kaufmann who put it
>>at 3,10,10,15,29    3=pawn  29 = queen   with the 2 bishops =21
>
>This is based on the same observation.  Me and Larry discussed this
>stuff at length and he came up with these values as an improvement
>over the traditional ones.  His reasoning was to find the lowest
>possible "resolution" that made sense.  He didn't like quarters, where
>a pawn is 4 points and decided  "thirds" was a pretty reasonable scale.
>We were designing a program at the time and decided 96 would be the
>value for a pawn, a number with lot's of divisors (3 being one of them)
>and close enough to 100 that it would be easy to talk about.   Of course
>we were probably being a little "anal" but we like to be precise!
>
>>These point counts are important and I didn't question the experiment
>>itself. I simply questioned the lack of search depth for a chess
>>experiment that purports to come up with a different point count and
>>pass this point count off as maybe more accurate than the historical
>>one.
>
>Read your post, you called the experiment flawed (not the results.)
>I don't think he was trying to pass off a new system either.
>
>Anyway, this exchange has been good, it clarifies the way you actually
>see the experiment and it's results which were not obvious from
>your original post.
>
>- Don


I agree.  "lack of search depth" is totally immaterial here... the issue
was *not* to quantify precise values for the pieces... It was to develop
an approach that *can* quantify the values of the pieces.  This is all
about the "approach" and *not* about the "values" themselves...  I
suspect
that a search depth of infinity might prove that the pawn is the most
valuable piece on the board, because it will ultimately promote and
become
a piece that mates your opponent.  That is a depth issue... *not* a
paradigm
issue here..



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