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Subject: Re: hanging pieces in rebel

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 03:44:54 01/16/04

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On January 16, 2004 at 05:55:48, Tord Romstad wrote:

>On January 15, 2004 at 14:49:21, Bernward Klocke wrote:
>
>>I recently read Ed Schroeder's comments on move ordering in rebel. What I find
>>puzzeling is the way it detects hanging pieces.
>>Ed presents the following data structure for square evaluation:
>>+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+
>>| BIT0 | BIT1 | BIT2 | BIT3 | BIT4 | BIT5 | BIT6 | BIT7 |
>>+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+
>>|      Number of     | PAWN |KNIGHT| ROOK | QUEEN| KING |
>>|      ATTACKERS     |      |BISHOP|      |      |      |
>>+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+
>>
>>After all white pieces are done square F3 from WB looks as follows:
>>+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+  B0-B2 : 2 attackers
>>| BIT0 | BIT1 | BIT2 | BIT3 | BIT4 | BIT5 | BIT6 | BIT7 |
>>+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+  B3    : white pawn
>>|      Number of     | PAWN |KNIGHT| ROOK | QUEEN| KING |
>>|      ATTACKERS     |      |BISHOP|      |      |      |  B4    : white
>>knight/bishop
>>+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+
>>|  0   |   1  |  0   |  1   |  1   |  0   |  0   |  0   |
>>+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+------+
>>So evaluation is done for each square for black and for white. His example show
>>the square f3 for white attacked by a pawn from f3 and a knight from g1.
>>This example is clear but I think gets ambiguous when three pieces attack a
>>square and two of them are of the same type eg. two rooks and a knight. How can
>>one see that it's not two knights and one rook.
>
>You can't.  In situations like this, where the total number of attackers
>is bigger than the number of piece types attacking the square, I always
>assume that there are more than one of the least valuable piece type
>among the attacker.  In your example, which in decimal notation gives
>the number 51, I assume that the square is attacked by one rook and
>two minor pieces.
>
>Doing like this, of course, means that you occasionally will get wrong
>results.  But the cases where it could go wrong are easily identified.
>At places in your search or eval where you absolutely need a more precise
>estimate of the expected material gain of a capture, you first check
>whether one of the attack vectors involved contain a bigger number of total
>attackers than number of piece types.  In these cases, you can revert to
>a slower and more accurate SEE function.  You'll probably find that it
>happens rarely enough that the slowdown is hardly noticable.
>
>>And the other thing is only going through the movelist isn't the whole story.
>>What if doubled rooks are the attackers? Only the first one will appear in the
>>movelist.
>>Does anybody know how this is solved. What did I miss?
>
>I don't quite understand the question, I'm afraid.  Could you please try
>to reformulate it?  How do movelists enter the picture?
>
>>Otherwise the lookup from a precalculated table of STATUS values seems elegant.
>
>I thought so too until recently, and used to have similar precalculated
>tables.  Later I have found that the idea isn't that great.  It is not very
>economical to have such huge lookup tables where most of the entries are
>never used.
>
>Instead of using table lookups, I now calculate the values on the fly
>from the attack vectors.  The results of the calculations are stored in a
>tiny hash table (2 kB).  Even without this hash table, calculating on the
>fly was only marginally slower than using a lookup table.  After adding
>the hash table, calculating on the fly is as fast or in some positions very
>slightly faster than using a lookup table.
>
>Tord

Do you calculate things like number of pawn attackers,knight attackers,rook
attackers including indirect attacks when the rook support another rook
incrementally after every move?

Do you have this in a small table for the 64 squares of the board?

Uri



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