Author: Shane Hudson
Date: 14:48:09 07/23/02
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On July 23, 2002 at 03:11:17, Dann Corbit wrote: >On July 23, 2002 at 03:04:39, Pham Hong Nguyen wrote: > >>Hey Dann, I did not say about your test set - yes, all games of that test set >>were artificially created to illustrate how important underpromotions are. >>However, I am mentioning about _real_ games - other story. > >Almost all of those positions I posted are from *REAL GAMES*. Only a very tiny >fraction are made up positions. > >>If you or someone could (or I will do when I have spare time), do a small >>research about underpromotions in real games (of any database): count and report >>total number of underpromotions / total number of promotions. The statistics >>will help us on decision of design. > >The amount of useful underpromotions in real games will definitely be higher >than you think. If it is as small as one in a million games where >underpromotion provides benefit, I will be utterly astonished. I investigated this once for the purpose of improving material and position search times in my database app Scid. Here are stats on the number of games containing a promotion to each type of piece in a database of 594,803 mostly master-level games: Piece Games Freq per 1000 games ------------------------------------- Any 24747 41.61 Q 24083 40.50 N 506 0.85 R 227 0.38 B 72 0.12 ------------------------------------- Whether many of those promotions to Rook or Bishop were actually useful (superior to a Queen promotion) is anyone's guess. I suspect most occurred in situations where the piece will immediately get taken anyway. Cheers, Shane
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