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Subject: Re: Implementing Planning in an Engine

Author: David Dahlem

Date: 12:24:31 02/04/04

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On February 04, 2004 at 14:51:56, Slater Wold wrote:

>One of these days, I will break through simply writting a move generator...
>
>When I do, this was one of my first things to do.  Have dynamic piece values,
>and a planning routine, and see how, without anything else (per se) it performs.
>
>Just take the basic do & don't, and try to let the engine figure out the rest.
>Perhaps a great resource for this would be Max Euwe's book, "Judgement &
>Planning in Chess".
>
>

I think this is a great, interesting idea. A non-beancounter. :-)

Please do this as soon as possible. :-)

Dave


>
>On February 04, 2004 at 14:15:33, Tom Likens wrote:
>
>>
>>Hello Everyone,
>>
>>I'm getting ready to implement some new features in my engine and
>>one of the items on my TODO list is to give the engine some rudimentary
>>planning capablities.  The idea I've been toying with is to use the
>>features of the pawn structure (and the king locations) to guide what
>>the engine should try over the next few moves.  The advantage of using
>>the pawn formation as a trigger or even index into a variety of evaluation
>>functions, (perhaps dynamically selected by a function pointer at runtime)
>>is that the information could be stored in the pawn hash table for
>>easy retrieval.
>>
>>As an example, if the center is blocked and white has a preponderance of
>>force and space on the king side then it may be okay to start a king-
>>side attack using the white king pawns to break open the black king's
>>castled location.  At the very least moves like g4, h4 should be considered.
>>This would be especially true if the black queen was trapped on the
>>queenside and the black's king safety was already weakened.  Other
>>factors would be control of the squares around the enemy king, but the
>>initial trigger would be the features of the pawn structure.
>>
>>Anyway, this is just one example other patterns could be the Stonewall,
>>the pawn chains that arise out of the French Defence, the Caro-Kan etc.
>>or even recognizing when a queenside minority attack made sense.
>>
>>In fact, I've starting using a variation of this idea in the king safety
>>routines.
>>I recently started saving the pawn state of the six squares directly in front
>>of the king (if a pawn is present then bit is set in an 8-bit index).  This
>>value, once calculated, is used as an index into an array of function
>>pointers that point to functions tailored for the specific pawn structure
>>(e.g. if the pawn structure is a fianchetto structure then elements related
>>to the strength or weakness of the fianchetto bishop etc. are checked).
>>So far, the results have been encouraging but it needs a lot of tuning and
>>experimentation.
>>
>>Anyway, I was wondering has anyone else here given any of these
>>ideas a try yet?  And if so, how successful have they been?
>>
>>regards,
>>--tom



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