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Reinhard Scharnagl wrote on Sat, Apr 19, 2008 12:45 PM UTC:

A short remark on piece values: first, my published model is not my last word, I still am working on that.

As I have stated already an amount of time ago, piece values are depending from the percentage of emptyness of the board. It concerns the mobility value part of sliding pieces. This would lead to dynamic piece values of sliding pieces slowly growing through a game. SMIRF unfortunately is far away from that.

Then I modified my thoughts on the nature of a bishop pair value bonus, which in fact had not been implemented in SMIRF yet at all. Errornously I derived that value modification from the fact, that a Bishop can reach merely one half of a board. But this is only a legal but misleading view on that strange effect. Today I am relating this paradoxon to the hideability of pieces more valued than a Bishop. Thus there is a chance to positionally devalue an opposite single Bishop by moving ones big pieces preferred on squares coloured oppositely to the Bishop's one. But that view demands the value bonus not to be applied statically by summing up piece values and such a bonus, but by writing an appropriate positional detail evaluation (as I have done intuitively in SMIRF).

To try to find out piece values by having teams of different armies fighting each other seems to be very promising at a first sight. But as you see in those huge table bases: a lot of optimal play is done pure combinatorically and could end contrarily, if placing one piece only a step aside. Thus it is hard to understand why to densly relate outcomes of a games and piece values. In an extreme constellation having King+Knight against King (which is a draw anyway) such an approach would lead to the conclusion, that a Knight is valued to nothing.

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Comments

Aberg variation of Capablanca's Chess. Different setup and castling rules. (10x8, Cells: 80)

💡📝Hans Aberg wrote on Sat, May 3, 2008 04:43 PM UTC:

H.G.Muller:
| But the point is that this does not alter the piece values.

Right, though that might be just a preferred way to structure theory because it suits human thinking. Essentially, define contexts, and attach values to them. First define piece values in nutralk settings. Then observe that the bishop pair gets an added value. Then try to figure out values for good and poor bishops. And so on. By contrast, computers tend to be very poor at handling such contexts, so other methods might be suitable for programs.

Derek Nalls wrote on Sat, May 3, 2008 03:26 PM UTC:

Muller:

You have my best regards toward your worthwhile effort to publish your
empirical, statistical method for obtaining the material values of pieces
in the ICGA Journal.  My assessment is that it will surely be a much
better paper than the junk [name removed] published in the same journal
regarding piece values.

[The above has been edited to remove a name and/or site reference. It is
the policy of cv.org to avoid mention of that particular name and site to
remove any threat of lawsuits. Sorry to have to do that, but we must
protect ourselves. -D. Howe]

H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, May 3, 2008 03:22 PM UTC:

Sure, this is what people do and have done for ages. It is well known that the advantage of having the move is worth 1/6 of a Pawn, (corresponding in normal Chess to a white score of 53-54%) and that, by inference, wasting a full move is equivalent to 1/3 of a Pawn.

But the point is that this does not alter the piece values. It just adds to them, like every positional advantage adds to them. In my test the advantage of having the lead move is neutralized by playing every position both with white to move and black to move.

💡📝Hans Aberg wrote on Sat, May 3, 2008 11:50 AM UTC:

H.G.Muller:
| As piece values are only useful as strategic guidelines for quiet
| positions, they cannot be sensitive to who has the move.

At the beginning of the game, white is thought to have a slight advantage, and the first task of black will be attempting to neutralize that. And it might be possible set a picee value to that positional advantage, just as when reasoning in terms of getting positional compensation for a sacrifice. Somewhat less han a pawn, perhaps. If one knows about the black/white winning statistics, one might be able to set a value on it that way. It may not be usable for a computer program as it does not change sides, but only computes the relative values of moves.

H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, May 3, 2008 10:34 AM UTC:

As piece values are only useful as strategic guidelines for quiet positions, they cannot be sensitive to who has the move. A position where it matters who has the move is by definition nont quiet, as one ply later that characteristic will have essentially changed. So at the level of piece-value strategies, Chess is a perfectly symmetric game.

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