Author: Tim Foden
Date: 15:06:35 04/27/03
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On April 27, 2003 at 10:56:45, Robert Hyatt wrote: >On April 26, 2003 at 19:15:04, Drexel,Michael wrote: > >>Today I started an interesting experiment. >>A match Chessmaster 9000 against Shredder 7.04 in Chessbase GUI with >>over-optimistically settings for The King 3.23. >>With this settings The King engine evaluates his positions almost always as >>better for himself, except it is completely lost. > >You are overlooking a key point. The alpha/beta algorithm is relative to >the initial score. If a program starts off at +3.0, and another program >starts off at 0.0 in the same position, the two programs can play >identically. All alpha/beta tries to do is maximize the raw score at the >root, whether it is +3 or -3 is irrelevant... This is of course true. And the effects on a particular engine would depend much on the way that the piece scores are used. However, he isn't just adding +3.0 to the score of one side... he is (in effect) adding <some-const>*pieces. So every time otherwise equal material is swapped, the engine will believe it has lost relative to the opponent. I thus this would make the engine less likely to exchange material, and this must modify the way it plays... it would try to make more positional compensation before swapping, for example. Also, if it used the piece-material values in some way for king safety, then it may make the king safety into a kind of a-symmetrical one. So, basically, I don't agree that it will have no effect at all. :) Cheers, Tim.
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