Sam Trenholme wrote on Tue, Jul 1, 2008 07:23 PM UTC:
I think the best way to come up with reasonable piece values is to have a computer program play itself hundreds or thousands of games of a given chess variant, and use genetic selection (evolution) to choose the version of the program with piece values that win the most games.
You can even have mating (Sex! Can we say that on the Chess Variants site?): Two sets of known piece values can mate and the resulting piece values will be an average of the piece values of the two 'mates' (with some randomization; the 'child''s piece values will be a random mix of the two 'parents' piece values).
I could do it myself, but I need a chess variant engine that I can set, from the command line, white's and black's values of the pieces independently, and then have the variant play itself a game of the chess variant.
You can even have mating (Sex! Can we say that on the Chess Variants site?): Two sets of known piece values can mate and the resulting piece values will be an average of the piece values of the two 'mates' (with some randomization; the 'child''s piece values will be a random mix of the two 'parents' piece values).
I could do it myself, but I need a chess variant engine that I can set, from the command line, white's and black's values of the pieces independently, and then have the variant play itself a game of the chess variant.
- Sam