Author: Michael Neish
Date: 21:36:41 11/23/99
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Hi, I started this thread, "The Limits of Positional Knowledge" about a couple of weeks ago. I'm happy to see that it's still ticking over, although by now it's evolved pretty far from what my original question was! A couple of the early replies to my question were on the mark, but the rest have strayed into areas far more noble and sophisticated than my lowly inquiry. But since no one's really answered my (naive) question -- maybe there is no answer? -- I'll restate it. Having recently written my first program, which can search only up to 6-ply, that's if you want it to move sometime before the big crunch, I thought what would happen if I stubbornly kept to a 6-ply limit and just tried to improve the program's playing strength by giving it increasingly better positional sense? I presume that given perfect positional knowledge no lookahead at all would be required, since all tactical opportunities would be nipped at the bud (although how it would exploit tactical blunders by the opponent is a separate question in itself). So my question was "how strong can a program become just by concentrating on the positional evaluation?". I will allow the use of extensions if a tactical possibility is discovered. I fiddled with my program with this in mind, and although I found that it seems to ponder over better moves quicker with a better evaluation function, I seem to be hitting a wall as far as performance improvement is concerned. For instance, if I play the program against itself, with White adopting the old parameters, and Black the new, it seems Black plays better, but after developing an advantage it cannot convert. I appreciate any replies. Thanks. Mike
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