Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 19:26:03 12/03/02
Go up one level in this thread
On December 03, 2002 at 20:39:21, Bob Durrett wrote:
>On December 02, 2002 at 22:27:07, Bob Durrett wrote:
>
>>
>>Intuitively, is seems that it should be possible to write a program to do the
>>following:
>>
>>(1) Examine a given position to generate good "fantasy positions" based,
>>perhaps, on use of a pattern recognition scheme. A library of relevant patterns
>>might be called up out of memory and then a "very smart" subprogram would
>>synthesize candidate fantasy positions. This synthesis might utilize a routine
>>to maximize the position evaluation score, where placement of the available
>>pieces is treated as a variable.
>>
>>(2) Analysis to find possible legal move sequences leading from the "given
>>position" to the currently considered "fantasy position." Legal move sequences
>>would be an output.
>>
>>(3) Conventional search engine analyses whose purpose would be to determine
>>whether or not any of the legal move sequences would be playable. The main
>>purpose would be to rule out legal move sequences which would not likely occur.
>>This would happen if the intermediate positions had "best moves" which were
>>different from the moves in that sequence.
>>
>>Maybe some of this could be done more or less concurrently and/or interactively.
>>
>>Admittedly, this is a "half-baked" idea. It seriously needs refinement.
>>
>>Could any of the programmers here at ICD CCC produce such a program if they
>>wanted to?
>>
>>Bob D.
>
>Since there has been no response, I assume that I failed to communicate.
>
>Fantasy positions considered in human chess are closely related to the real
>position under evaluation. The requirement, that useful fantasy positions must
>be reached by legal move sequences from the position being evaluated, forces
>people to consider modified forms of the real position, but with the available
>pieces re-arranged somewhat on the chess board. Generally, repositioning of ALL
>of the pieces and pawns would never be considered. It is much more usual to
>consider repositioning of only a few. The mental process involved here treats
>the position of the pieces [and sometimes pawns] as an independent variable.
>
>The first problem seems to be to identify good fantasy positions which satisfy
>the above requirements. There may be more than one way to do that, I don't
>know. To avoid wasting time on evaluation of bad fantasy positions, it might be
>best to use a position evaluation function to quickly look at the alternatives.
>Limited conventional searching to identify inherent tactical features might also
>make sense. This could weed out many unpromising fantasy positions.
>
>The use of a library of relevant position fragments may or may not be a good
>idea.
>
>The overall concept is to try to emulate the human process of imagining fantasy
>positions followed by evaluation of their merit and identification of good ways
>to reach those positions.
>
>Would a chess program doing that be competitive with conventional chess engines?
> Probably not. But the real question is whether or not a decent chessplaying
>program could be produced by using the idea.
That genre of stuff is usually called "Retrograde analysis" instead of "fantasy
chess" which sounds a lot like "fairy chess" {e.g. Popeye}.
Retrograde analysis links:
http://www.janko.at/Retros/
http://www.geocities.com/byleomano/
Programs for retrograde analysis:
http://lestourtereaux.free.fr/euclide/
http://www.stanford.edu/~hwatheod/Retractor/
http://natch.free.fr/Natch.html
Fairy chess:
http://web.iol.cz/vaclav.kotesovec/
http://winchloe.free.fr/
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