Author: Peter Fendrich
Date: 12:07:36 11/08/98
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On November 08, 1998 at 12:15:30, James Long wrote: > >I recently received a game via email that Tristram played >against Gromit. Tristram had 1 queen, 1 rook and 3 pawns >vs a lone king, and allowed Gromit a stalemate. I've >tried and tried to reproduce this, but can't seem to get >Tris to replay this move. > >My first thoughts were that I should've implemented that >stalemate guard in my endgame eval. I read about this >in the "Chess 4.5" chapter of "Chess Skill in Man and >Machine." Doing this is painfully slow, though. I ran >some suites with it last night, and it's ugly. > >Seems to me the stalemate should've been caught in the >search. > >Do any of you have a stalemate guard in your evaluation? >Has anybody tried this and tossed it out? > > >--- >James Stalemates should definitively be discovered in the search. When there are no moves and the King is not in check it is stalemate. It costs nearly nothing... I don't think it's a good idea to detect stalemates in the evaluation function if the program uses quiescence search, because then the evaluation function almost always is called from such a search and the very rare cases of stalemate isn't worth the effort to detect. The quiescence path isn't optimal anyway and it's hard to use it for more sophisticated logic than what a capture search give you and maybe a few other things. //Peter
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