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Including Piece Values on Rules Pages[Subject Thread] [Add Response]
H. G. Muller wrote on Sun, Mar 10 08:07 AM UTC in reply to Kevin Pacey from Sat Mar 9 09:48 PM:

I am not sure what you try to demonstrate with this example. Obviously something that has never been tested in any way, but just pulled out of the hat of the one who suggests it, should be considered of questionable value, and should be accompanied by a warning. As Dr. Nunn does, for untested opening lines. And as I do, for untested piece values. That is an entirely different situation than mistrusting someone who reports results of an elaborate investigation, just because he is the only one so far that has done such an investigation. It is the difference of someone being a murder suspect merely because he has no alibi, or having an eye witness that testifies under oath he saw him do it. That seems a pretty big difference. And we are talking here about publication of results that are in principle verifiable, as they were accompanied by a description of the method obtaining them, which others could repeat. That is like a murder in front of an audience, where you so far only had one of the spectators testify. I don't think that the police in that case would postpone the arrest until other witnesses were located and interviewed. But they would not arrest all the people that have no alibi.

And piece values are a lot like opening lines. It is trivial to propose them, as an educated guess, but completely non-obvious what would be the result of actually playing that opening line or using these piece values to guide your play. It is important to know if they are merely proposed as a possibilty, or whether evidence of any kind has been collected that they actually work.