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Subject: Re: king safety

Author: Stuart Cracraft

Date: 13:15:05 03/01/99

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On March 01, 1999 at 15:25:45, Will Singleton wrote:

>
>On March 01, 1999 at 13:28:50, Stuart Cracraft wrote:
>
>>Hi,
>>
>>I'm curious what kinds of things people have for evaluating king safety.
>>
>>Yes I've looked at Crafty but am more interested now in a variety of
>>people's viewpoints on KING SAFETY.
>>
>>Stuart
>
>Mine isn't anything to shout about, but it's a lot better than it used to be.  I
>used to fall for just about any kside attack a good player could come up with;
>now that occurs more rarely.
>
>I talked with Dan Homan about this some time ago, and he shared some ideas about
>his methods.  I've modified the approach since then to fit the way my program
>works.  Basically, I just compute two things: how much is the king being
>threatened, and how much do I care about it.  That is, if my king is
>well-protected, should I care if the opponent has a couple pieces nearby?
>Certainly not as much as when my king has a pawn missing and no defensive pieces
>around.
>
>So I just multiply the threat by the "do I care" factor, and that seems to work
>pretty well.  It was difficult to balance the numbers (attacker vs defender),
>resulting in my program throwing pieces at the enemy sometimes.  But I do it
>asymetrically now, and most times it works.
>
>Will

And how do you compute "how much the king is being threatened" and
"how much you care" ?



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