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Subject: Re: Improving the endgame of my engine

Author: Renze Steenhuisen

Date: 05:13:11 04/08/04

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>>I'm about to start coding on my engine again and have thought about improving
>>the endgame play. I don't like using egtb so I'm thinking about using special
>>evaluation cases when there are few pieces left on the board. Is this a good
>>idea or is special evaluation cases a dead end?
>
>i do the same. my problem is that i have only covered a couple of special cases
>up to now, and not in much detail. another problem is that many things are still
>the same for all endgames; e.g. it is nearly always good to have a centralized
>king, and it is always good to have passers and candidates and so on. however,
>for example the value of a passer depends on the endgame type. so you need some
>kind of strategy for computing common things for all endgames, and only doing
>some special stuff for the special cases. because if you want to write an entire
>eval for every type of ending, your code will get HUGE :-)

If it pays of, it doesn't really matter... Although it is lots of work!

>i still haven't figured out a really good way to do this myself, my code is a
>bit of a mess in this respect :-(

Tidy it up then, it gives you some time to think about your code as well. Most
of the time I do such a thing it does help!

>but in principle, i believe that you need special knowledge for different
>endings. there *are* huge differences between different types of endgames, and
>this leads to eval discontinuities - but i'm pretty certain that you shouldn't
>worry about this. there is the "eval discontinuity = evil" fraction here with
>bob as spokesperson. but as a chess player i can assure you that these
>discontinuities are absolutely real, and IMO a good evaluation should know about
>them...
>
>cheers
>  martin

What is the definition of End Game in here? Are we talking about late endgame
(==EGTBs have been generated), or are we talking about more general things like
"Pawn Ending", etc etc?

Cheers!
  Renze



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