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Subject: Re: Incremental Evaluations

Author: Pauli Misikangas

Date: 04:18:47 10/28/98

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On October 27, 1998 at 15:54:25, Peter McKenzie wrote:

>On October 27, 1998 at 09:16:59, Mike Stoker wrote:
>
>>Does anyone know if any of the current chess programs perform incremental
>>evaluations of positions.  I.e. To evaluate a position after a move is played,
>>just consider the changed features of the position.  I think a possible way to
>
>Most programs maintain at least part of their evaluation incrementally, for
>example material, and the piece square table based evaluation.  For the pawn
>structure evaluation, using a separate hash table is even faster than
>maintaining the score incrementally.  For some other things, incremenatal
>evaluation might get pretty complex.

In my Shocky (which is mainly a shogi program, but can play also chess, although
quite poorly at the moment) I use fully incremental evaluation. During every
move, I update only those parts of the evaluation that have changed. So, when
the "evaluation function" is called I only sum all evaluation-values (material,
attack, ..., see the list below) together. Currently, the evaluation consists of
the following parts:

- material
- attack
- defense
- board control
- piece position
- piece movement
- castling (not as in chess, pieces around the king)
- king safety
- hand pieces (in shogi you can drop captured piece back to the board)
- piece freedoms (number of safe squares to which pieces can move)
- blocked pieces (penalty for pieces that cannot move safely)
- plan success (for example, Shocky might have a plan to make a castle)

I quess that many of those values would make my evaluation extremely slow if
they were calculated each time 'evaluate' is called. With incremental evaluation
they can be calculated at a very low cost.

PS. I don't use bitboards.

- Pauli Misikangas -



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