Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 08:43:59 01/16/02
Go up one level in this thread
On January 16, 2002 at 07:41:28, Graham Laight wrote: >It has occurred to me that it is wrong to evaluate a position in terms of >relative pawns (the "de facto" standard - whereby an evaluation of 2 means that >you're approximately the equivalent of 2 pawns ahead). > >This means that many aspects of evaluation have to be squeezed into a dimension >which is not appropriate at all. > >A better way would be to evaluate "winning probability". If a position was a >draw, the value would be 0.50 (or 50%). If the player should win 3 out of 4 >times, the eval should be 75%. If the player must win from here, then the >evaluation should be 100%. > >It seems strange when you think about it that all programmers have chosen to >adopt the traditional "pawn equivalence" standard. > >-g It is harder to do otherwise. IE KPP vs K is winning, except for some rare cases, while KR vs KB is drawn. It would be very hard to translate some sort of material imbalance into a winning percentage. As a general rule, the more material you are ahead, the better your chances, with some exceptions that many engines know about...
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