Author: Marc Plum
Date: 16:56:10 08/10/99
A while back I ran some multiple engine tournaments within the Nimzo99 interface. One thing that I noticed was that some programs would make meaningless underpromotions. That is, in a position where a promoted pawn would be immediately exchanged anyway, the computer might promote to a bishop or rook rather than a queen. I had occasionally encountered the same thing in my own games with computers; I also found a small number of computer games like this when doing a database search for underpromotions. I don't have any statistics to present; I'm just noting that this happens not infrequently. When a human player does this, he is probably just being whimsical, or it could be a psychological ploy. I wonder, though, why a computer would do it. Is it just a random thing? Does the computer reason that losing a bishop is less bad than losing a queen, even though the resulting position is the same? Or do computers like messing with people's minds too? Marc Plum
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