Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Very interesting position.. Crafty vs ProDeo

Author: Tord Romstad

Date: 06:57:45 08/24/04

Go up one level in this thread


On August 24, 2004 at 06:14:32, Uri Blass wrote:

>On August 24, 2004 at 04:57:02, Tord Romstad wrote:
>
>>Making the static eval aware of its limitations offers many interesting
>>possibilities, and I think there are many valuable and important ideas
>>waiting to be found by the adventurous programmer here.  The basic
>>idea is to extend in positions where the static eval is likely to be
>>highly inaccurate, and to reduce in positions where it is likely to
>>be very accurate (internal node recognizers is an extreme special case).
>
>The idea is simple but the problem is to write evaluation to evaluate the
>variety of the score.

In general, it is of course very difficult.  But a few simple special
cases can be implemented rather easily.  One case was the one I described
in my previous message:  Winning material advantage for one side, a very
strong attack for the other side.  A similar case is when a huge material
advantage is compensated by dangerous passed pawns.  In both of these
cases, the static eval is likely to be highly unreliable, and it makes
sense to extend.  For reductions, consider the case of a simple endgame
where one side is ahead by a rook and the other side has no passed pawns,
and the stronger side has no hanging pieces.  In such situations, the
winning score returned by the static eval is almost certainly correct,
and reducing the depth is relatively safe.

Perhaps it would be possible to improve and generalize such techniques
by statistical methods.  Start with a huge set of positions from real
games, along with the results of all the games.  Let your chess engine
evaluate all the positions, and look at the values of all the components
of the evaluation function (material, pawn structure, mobility, centre
control, king safety, hanging/pinned pieces, etc.).  By studying the
data, it is possible that we could find formulas to make crude estimates
of the probability distribution of the three possible results based on
the "evaluation vector".

Tord



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.