Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Evaluation Should Be Winning Probability - Not Pawns

Author: J. Wesley Cleveland

Date: 18:21:57 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

another advantage of using winning percentage and drawing percentage ia that you
could use these to determine how deeply to search branches, e.g. if it is 99%
draw, you would not need to search deeper, but if it is 30% win and 40% draw,
you would want to search much deeper. Note that both of these would have about 0
pawn value.



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.