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Aberg variation of Capablanca's Chess. Different setup and castling rules. (10x8, Cells: 80) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

H.G.Muller wrote on Mon, Apr 28, 2008 07:06 AM UTC:

Hans Aberg:
| I describe how a piece value theory might be developed without 
| statistics. Since one P or R ahead generically wins, set them to 
| the same value. Now this does not work in P against R; so set the 
| value higher than P. Then continue this process in order to refine 
| it, comparing different endings that may appear in play, taking away 
| special cases, always with respect to tournament practice, using 
| postmortem game analysis.

It seems to me that in the end this would produce exactly the same
results, at the expense of hundred times as much work. You would still
have to play the games to see which piece combinations dominantly win. But
now you would throw away the information on how much, making the outcome of
65% equivalent to one of 95%.

While in fact there is very much information in this, as tsmall advantages
turmn out to be additive to a high degree of accuracy. If Pawn odds is 62%,
and Q vs A is 59%, I can be pretty sure that A+P vs Q will be 53%. In the
system you propose, you would have to actually play A+P vs Q before you
would know if A is worthe more or less than Q minus P.

This in particular applies to the fractional advantages. If a B-pair wins
56% from a B anti-pair, and you would only interpret that as 'B-pair is
good', you would have to explicitly test the B-pair against any other
fractional advantage (e.g. Q+BB(unpaired) vs C+BB(paired), Q+BB(unpaired)
vs A+BB(paired), etc to know that the pair advantage was half a Pawn,
rather than 3/4 or 1/4.

Why do you think this is an attractive method, and why would you expect it
to give different results in the first place? Can you construct a
hypothetical example (of score percentages) where your analysis method
would produce different results from mine?