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Subject: Predatory instinct

Author: Scott Gasch

Date: 15:06:40 08/13/99


Another question: my chess program is starting to play relatively well...
recently I was playing it against another program on xboard and my program ended
up in a king & rook vs king endgame.  Well, needless to say this should have
been an easy win.  However, my program never seemed to see deep enough (it was
searching to 12+ ply) to make mate.  Instead it just liked to keep checking the
other guy's king.  :(

Since then I looked at the evaluation routines for some open source programs
hoping to find some little heuristic to help the pieces move more aggressively
and towards a mate.  I did not see anything.

I am thinking about coding a large term of the endgame eval routine based on the
king's mobility in the hope that this will encourage the program to "trap" the
other guy's king and reduce the size of his sandbox until it's checkmate.  Has
anyone done something like this?  How are other people developing the killer
instinct in won endgames?

Scott



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