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Subject: chess stats question

Author: James Swafford

Date: 15:14:41 10/31/01



I'm playing around with a hyperbolic tangent function in order
to predict a reward [-1 ... 1] based on my raw evaluation score
of the principal variation.

I've come up with predicted_reward = tanh(pawn_adv/300), where
a pawn advantage of 1 pawn ---> pawn_adv=100.

The following table shows the relationship between pawn_adv and
predicted_reward:

pawn_adv   predicted_reward
.1         .033
.25        .083
.33        .11
.4         .133
.5         .165
.75        .245
1          .32
2          .58
3          .76
4          .87
5          .93
6          .964
7          .981
8          .990
9          .995
10         .9975
12         .9993
15         .9999

So... a 1 pawn advantage yields a predicted reward of .32.

Has anybody done research, or know of research, that can tell me
how close those figures are?  i.e. if your program obtains a
1 pawn advantage, do you know how likely it is to win?

Tridgell and Baxter's paper says they give a one pawn advantage
a predicted reward of .25, but it doesn't say why they chose
that number.  Maybe they pulled it out of thin air, I don't know.

Comments?  Anybody know of a better function than tanh() to
do this?

--
James



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