Check out Janggi (Korean Chess), our featured variant for December, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
H. G. Muller wrote on Tue, Jun 17, 2008 06:51 AM UTC:
George Duke:
| Has initial array positioning already entered discussion for 
| value determinations?

No, it hasn't, and I don't think it should, as this discussion is about
Piece Values, and not about positional play. Piece values are by
definition averages over all positions, and thus independent on the
placement of pieces on the board.

Note furthermore that the heuristic of evaluation is only useful for
strategic characteristics of a position, i.e. characteristics that tend to
be persistent, rather than volatile. Piece placement can be such a trait,
but not always. In particular, in the opening phase, pieces are not locked
in the places they start, but can find plenty better places to migrate to,
as the center of the board is still complete no-man's land. Therefore, in
the opening phase, the concept of 'tempo' becomes important: if you waste
too much time, the opponent gets the chance to conquer space, and prevent
your pieces that were badly positioned in the array to properly develop.

I did some asymmetric playtesting for positional values in normal Chess, swapping Knights and Bishops for one side, or Knights and Rooks. I was not able to detect any systematic advantage the engines might have been deriving from this. In my piece value testing I eliminate positionsal influences by playing from positions that are as symmetric as possible given the material imbalance. And the effect of starting the pieces involved in the imbalance in different places is averaged out by playing from shuffled arrays, so that each piece is tried in many different locations.

Edit Form
Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Avoid Inflammatory Comments
If you are feeling anger, keep it to yourself until you calm down. Avoid insulting, blaming, or attacking someone you are angry with. Focus criticisms on ideas rather than people, and understand that criticisms of your ideas are not personal attacks and do not justify an inflammatory response.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.