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Piece Values[Subject Thread] [Add Response]

Reinhard Scharnagl wrote on Sun, May 25, 2008 10:39 AM UTC:

Harm wrote: ... 'OTOH, a program that evaluates every position as a
completely random number starts to play quite reasonable ches, once the
search reaches 8-10 ply. Because it is biased to seek out moves that lead
to pre-horizon nodes that have the largest number of legal moves, which
usually are the positions where the strongest pieces are still in its
possession.' ...

This is nothing but a probability based heuristic simulating a mobility
evaluation component. But having a working positional evaluation,
especially when also covering mobility, that randomizing method is not
orthogonal to the calculated much more appropriate knowledge. Thus you
will overlay a much better evaluation by a disturbing noise generator. 

Nevertheless this approach might have advantages through the opening,
preventing some else working implementations of preinvestigated killer
combinations.