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Subject: Re: One more Question for John Merlino about the King parms

Author: F. Huber

Date: 09:45:36 05/07/03

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On May 07, 2003 at 12:07:20, John Merlino wrote:

>On May 07, 2003 at 11:37:29, Brian Thomas wrote:
>
>>Hey John,
>>
>>Out of curiosity do you know the min/max values of the King parameters?  Out of
>>curiosity I tried to get the default/min/max of each of the king's parameters
>>from within the CM9k GUI.  The defaults are pretty well known, the negatives are
>>pretty well known, but I'm looking for the upward limit.
>>
>>Interestingly, when I set the queen (either Own or Opposing) values to max, the
>>GUI sends a value of 99 to the engine.  What's weird is that the default is 100,
>>and one would assume it could go higher.
>>
>>Ideas?
>>
>>Thanks,
>>Brian
>
>According to my documents, here are the min and max values for the GUI:
>
>All pieces are between 0 and 15
>Attacker/Defender: -100 to 100
>Strength of Play: 0 to 100
>Randomness of Play: 0 to 100
>Book Depth: 0 to 100 (although no book is deeper than 40 plies)
>Search Depth: 1 to 99 (although The King has a max search depth of 46 plies)
>Selective Search: 1 to 16
>Contempt for Draw: -5 to 5
>Transposition Table: 512K to 2GB
>Material/Positional: -100 to 100
>Control of Center, Mobility, King Safety, Passed Pawns and Pawn Weakness are all
>0 to 200
>
>However, many of these values are translated from what the user sees into the
>appropriate values for The King. I'm pretty sure that the material value that is
>sent to the engine is in the form of a PERCENTAGE of the typical value. This is
>why the default is 100 for pieces. So, a value of 15 for queens (the max) should
>result in something like 166 to The King.
>
>BUT, the Material/Positional value will further modify the values for the
>pieces. The more that this value is set towards Material, the higher the piece
>values will be, and vice versa.
>
>I hope that made sense (and that it was correct)....
>
>jm

Hello John,

because you are certainly _the_ expert for ChessMaster/TheKing,
I hope that you´ll be able to answer the following question -
nobody else seems to really know that:

Has this strange King parameter ´ana´ any meaning for TheKing?
And if yes, what is its special purpose?

And one other thing I´m still confused about:
Since a long time now I´m really impressed about King´s ability
in solving mate problems very fast. The only thing I don´t like
is, that almost everytime TheKing first finds deeper solutions
than necessary, and eventually finds a shorter (or the shortest?)
mate after some further calculation.
So I had the idea to set Kings selectivity to 0 (sel=0), and I
hoped to get _only_ the real _shortest_ mate - but without success!
Also with sel=0 TheKing still seems to calculate deeper than its
actual depth.
Now my question:
Do _I_ think ´wrong´ here (that sel=0 should work), or doesn´t
take TheKing this setting as strictly as I would believe?

Best regards,
Franz.




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