Author: Anthony Cozzie
Date: 07:02:39 01/08/04
I've been trying to get some good test positions to rewrite my kingsafety with, and playing Gothmog will give you those :) Usually Zappa is slightly better than Gothmog. It is stronger tactically (gets more nps and does not do all dubious forward pruning) and its mobility is good enough that it plays reasonable moves most of the time. Usually Zappa will get its wins in the endgame, but Gothmog will get in enough king attacks that the score is close. During one of the test games, this position came up (Zappa-white, Gothmog-black): [D]r2qk2r/pb4pp/3bn3/1P1ppp2/8/BQP5/P2NBPPP/R4RK1 b kq - 4 17 Where Gothmog evaluated itself as +1, and Zappa thought it was about equal - which is of course ludicrous since black has a big advantage. I was less than happy with Zappa being blown off the board in 20 moves and not even realizing it, so I wrote some code to evaluate control of the board. But I made a mistake and tuned it way too high. What was amazing was the result. Every game went like this: Zappa pushes pawns Gothmog sacrifices a piece for the pawns Gothmog thinks its down .5 Zappa thinks its up 2 Zappa wins back pawns and the game with its extra piece/exchange Result: Zappa scores 86% - +18-0=7. Moral of the story: If you want to beat Gothmog, triple your space evaluation. anthony caveat: This was done under Arena, with the arena books, which need a bit of work.
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