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Subject: How Does HIARCS Work?

Author: Ratko V Tomic

Date: 15:27:31 09/29/99


Does anyone have any concrete info about algorithms used by Hiarcs?

Having played with it for couple years (since version 6, through
the latest 7.32), it is my impression that it understands LONG
TERM PIECE MOBILITY (control), going well beyond the simple checks
of that type (such as good-bad bishop, knight outposts, pawn blocades,
etc) which other programs probably use. Hiarcs seems to aim to maximize
its long term mobility in a concrete way for a given position (and of
course, to minimize the opponent's, which you can notice when you find
yourself without any good move, with board still full, and wonder how
did it do it without me noticing what he was up to), which suggests
it does some kind of preprocessing where it computes approximately the
effects of each root move on the overall long term mobility. From other
programs I don't get any such impression.

The only published algorithms (or sketches for such) that look at
this kind of evaluations using multimove single piece paths and
accountng (approximately) for possible blockades, I know of are
from the Botvinnik's book "Computers in Chess" (Springer-Verlag 1984,
ISBN 0-387-90869-2). Does anyone know whether Hiarcs have
implemented any of such algorithms (perhaps even the Botvinnik version),
or perhaps other methods which have a side-effect of improving long
term mobility? Could a large collection of rules-of-thumb (from
various chess tutorials) used in root choice preprocessing produce
the same side-effects?




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