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Subject: Re: So which programs beat which, only due to superior chess understanding?

Author: Dan Andersson

Date: 04:04:46 05/06/02

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>>Naturally there is also a good deal of chess "knowledge" in a good search, but
>>it is really different from what most people generally consider to be
>>"knowledge".
>
>These statements somewhat amaze me. I would have thought the most important
>thing for a chess engine (given an already decent search) is to have a good
>positional evaluation.
>

Given that piece-square programs can play excellent chess. You would do better
to improve that program by giving the search a better shape than increasing the
evaluator. F.ex. a well tuned extension scheme giving a 50% larger tree would in
most cases beat an evaluation giving the sane slowdown. I believe that a program
'style' and 'chess knowledge' come from the interplay between search and
evaluation and is reinforced by the feedback gained by the programmer when he
evaluates the resulting play.

>Not good in terms of quantity, but good in the terms of being seldom wrong
>by a large amount.
>

All evaluators are far from perfect. And in many cases litte better than
material+random. A lot of noise in there. Heck you can play chesslike by adding
a random number for each leaf node and propagating that to the eavluation. That
would be similar to mobility. And if you have an advance search you might steer
the search by assigning large heuristic values.

MvH Dan Andersson



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