Author: Mike S.
Date: 10:14:15 05/31/03
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On May 31, 2003 at 12:56:04, Reinhard Scharnagl wrote: >On May 31, 2003 at 12:00:06, Mike S. wrote: >[...] >> It has also been said (something like): postional play is just another term >> for very deep tactics, more or less. This could fit to the play of engines >> when they search very deep. > >For my opinion this is not true at all. The problem is still to evaluate quiet >positions only instead of positionally deescalated ones. You can have only a >goal within tree evaluation which is visible as a leaf node. As I know evaluated >leaf nodes today still ignore those dynamic positional aspects. The result is a >tactically strong play with positional highlights only by luck. What I wrote was meant from a human viewpoint, not how the engines handle this "internally". :-) I was thinking of the *first* move of the pv, which may look like a good positional move from a human viewpoint, while actually the engine calculates 22 plies ahead and sees that this move will in each case provide a material advantage or even a mate, then. In such cases it wouldn't even be neccessary to evaluate quiet positions at the end of such a search *positionally*, but still the resulting move sequence the engine finds, may look like perfect positional play from a human viewpoint... If a positional advantage cannot be proven by tactical means (sooner or later), than it isn't and advantage at all. Therefore, very deep calculation - which the inital poster was talking about (= very long calculation time) - can substitute clever positional evaluations (and can also substitute knowledge). You could see positional knowledge as an approximation of very deep calculation. I'm not 100% sure now, but IIRC Tarrasch or Lasker already said that, somewhere. If an engine could calculate 1.000 plies deep, it would'n need positional evaluations at all. Because, I guess there's hardly a 500 moves game which isn't won yet, or drawn by the 50 move rule (to illustrate my point with an extreme example). Therefore, it's obvious for me why computer games from very long thinking time look much more "positional" although the engines use the same evaluations like in a blitz game... Regards, M.Scheidl
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