Author: Michael Neish
Date: 00:37:10 11/11/99
Hello, I sent in a question to rec.games.chess.computer a while ago about how best to improve a newly-written Chess program, either by sharpening up its search routine or by programming a better positional sense. In reply I was recommended to study the available source code for ideas. This has led me to another question. Supposing you stubbornly insist on using alpha-beta, and not add any of the sophisticated embellishments that everyone talks about (killer move, null move, etc). How far can you expect to go just on programming positional sense alone? I ask this because it seems to me (as someone mentioned only last week on rgcc) that positional sense in a program is to a large extent only window dressing, and that the strength in a program lies mainly in its ability to search deep. From my meagre experience as a Chess programmer it seems to me that positional sense provides nothing more than general pointers to the program to play sensibly. To Dr. Hyatt, who was one of those who replied to me: have you ever tried feeding nonsensical positional variables to Crafty to see how its play is affected? Okay, maybe nonsensical values will ruin the evaluation function completely (like a value of 5,000 for putting the Queen on a1) but what about different weighting values from the one you use in Crafty, but still sensible? Won't the values that enable Crafty to search for the right move in one position be useless (or detrimental) in other positions? What difference can it make for the Bishop to get a score of 32 instead of 30 for landing on e4? Wouldn't incurring a heavy penalty for moving, say, Pawn to h5 in a front of your castled King prevent Crafty from playing h5 when it would be correct to do so? You will of course excuse me for not having studied every single line of Crafty's code. :) Thanks for your time. Mike.
This page took 0.07 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.