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Subject: Re: The Pawn Game revisited...

Author: Sune Fischer

Date: 23:43:29 09/20/03

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On September 21, 2003 at 01:00:37, Paul Byrne wrote:

>I read the thread on the pawn game last night...
>http://www.talkchess.com/forums/1/message.html?316441
>
>...and added it as a variant to Guildenstern (which is pretty basic
>as chess engines go, but is set up to handle rules variations like
>this -- first version took about 10 minutes).  The first version
>called it a win when a pawn hit the 7th rank; changing this to
>getting a passed pawn more advanced than the opponent's most advanced
>pawn (passed or not) caused a speedup of about 100x in solving the
>couple of test positions I was using.

Yes, that should result in some nice pruning :)

>I'm sure a program set up especially to solve this would be noticably
>faster (no need for code for castling, promotion, non-pawn moves, etc, etc)

That doesn't slow down my program very much, so I'd not expect a big increase in
removing it. There are other parts though, like SEE that could be greatly
simplified in this game.

>and running on a faster machine than my 1.2 GHz athlon would gain a ply or
>two.

>Adding a better eval function would likely aid move ordering some, accounting
>for the symmetry of the initial position would help, etc.  There are plenty
>of ways to improve on my basic program.
>
>I have to suspect the game is solvable -- perhaps not quickly, but not in a
>totally unreasonable about of time.

It also depends on what the solution is. If the game is a forced win for white
it could be a lot faster than proving it is a draw.

-S.

>-paul



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