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Subject: Re: K+P ending in practical play

Author: Ernst A. Heinz

Date: 05:19:39 10/28/98

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On October 27, 1998 at 22:00:54, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>Simple.  I do a *deep* search, and only do the pawn race evaluations at the
>*tips* and not on interior nodes.  I depend on the search to find the mates,
>the ways the opponent can create an even quicker-queening passer... and only
>after the normal 20+ plies of search are exhausted do I do the "race" test.

Delegating the race evaluation completely to the search is indeed simple but
actually far from satisfying (i.e., it is *too* simple IMHO).

Of course, if you have already reached an K+P endgame you can easily do the 20+
plies of search. Yet, it is impossible to resolve Pawn races by pure search if
you are on the verge of entering the according endgame. I know that all
quiescence searches are full of errors but still I do not want my evaluation to
return a premature winning score only because one side features an unstoppable
passed Pawn which is not worth much in reality. I think it is important to do
more than that in the evaluation in order to enable the search to find better
ways for *trading into* K+P endgames.

=Ernst=



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