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Subject: Re: Implementing Planning in an Engine

Author: Jaime Benito de Valle Ruiz

Date: 13:19:47 02/04/04

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I've got something similar in my TODO list as well (maybe by next year?). I
think it could work. Keep us informed if you get any interesting results.
Regards,

  Jaime

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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