Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 06:25:22 01/12/00
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On January 11, 2000 at 22:52:42, William Bryant wrote: >The issues of adding a term to the evaluation for blocked pawns has come up >in at least one thread recently, and got me thinking about adding this to >the evaluation. > >There are several ways to do this and it raised several questions. > >Do you count pawns blocked by opposite pawns only? >Do you also count pawns blocked by opposing pieces? >Do you count pawns blocked by your own pawns ? (I would think this would > be handled by a doubled pawn penalty.) > >Do you count blocked pawns only for the side on move? > Otherwise, for pawns blocked by enemy pawns, the same penalty will be > applied to both sides in the evaluation and the net score remains unchanged? > >Any thoughs or comments would be appreciated. > >William >wbryant@ix.netcom.com It is not easy. "rams" are easy, but only catch about 1/3 of the blocked pawns (rams are where two pawns are in contact on a file so they _really_ can't move.) But you have other cases (pawns at c4,d3,e4 for white, c5,d6,e5 for black. All the pawns here are blocked. There are other subtle cases. Pawn at h2 for white (none on g file) and pawn at h4 for black, none on g file. The pawns aren't in contact, they can move, but they are blocked... Perhaps more important for a computer program is not which are blocked, but rather "do you have any pawn levers you can use to open the position up?" I do this latter mainly, but it takes a good bit of computing to do it since you have to analyze all pawns to see which are free to advance, etc. Fortunately it gets buried in the pawn hashing stuff so it doesn't cost a lot.
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