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Hans Aberg wrote on Fri, May 2, 2008 01:08 PM UTC:

H.G.Muller:
| If piece values cannot be used to predict outcomes of games, they
| would be useless in the first place.

If one is materially behind, one knows one should better win the middle game, or win material back before coming into the end-game, unless the latter is a special case.

| Why would you want to be an exchange or a piece ahead, if it might
| as frequently mean you are losing as that you are winning?

This is indeed what happens if with programs focusing too much on material, or weak players starting with a piece ahead.

| Precisely knowing the limitations of your opponent allows
| you to play a theoretically losing strategy (e.g. doing bad trades) in
| order to set a trap.

Sure, this seems to be essentially to be the effect of a brute force search on a very fast computer.

| In general, this is a losing strategy, as in practice
| one cannot be sufficiently sure about where the opponent's horizon will
| be.

In human tournament playing, a top player either plays against opponents of lower horizon, or against well known opponents whose playing style has been well analyzed. In the first case, there is not much need to adapt playing as one can see deeper, but in the latter case, one certainly does choose strategies adapted against the opponent. Now, with computer programs, at least in the past, the GMs were pitted against program which they did not know that well, the latter which ran in special versions and on very fast computers when tried on humans. So humans do not get much of chance to develop better strategies. But this may not matter if the strategy does not allow them to handle the theoretical faulty combinations used by computer by relying on a somewhat deeper search.

| Fact is that I OBSERVE that the piece values I have given below
| do statistically predict the outcome of games with good precision.

You only observe past events, not the future, and a statistical prediction is only valid for for a true stochastic variable, or in situations that continue behave as such. But don't worry about this:

If you find methods to duplicate the analysis by Larry Kaufman, and use that to compute values for various pieces on boards like perhaps 8x8, 10x8, 12x8, then it seems simple enough to modify engines to play with different chess variants (if protocols like UCI are extended to cope with it).

I think though the real test will be when humans play against those programs.

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Comments

Aberg variation of Capablanca's Chess. Different setup and castling rules. (10x8, Cells: 80)

💡📝Hans Aberg wrote on Sat, May 3, 2008 04:43 PM UTC:

H.G.Muller:
| But the point is that this does not alter the piece values.

Right, though that might be just a preferred way to structure theory because it suits human thinking. Essentially, define contexts, and attach values to them. First define piece values in nutralk settings. Then observe that the bishop pair gets an added value. Then try to figure out values for good and poor bishops. And so on. By contrast, computers tend to be very poor at handling such contexts, so other methods might be suitable for programs.

Derek Nalls wrote on Sat, May 3, 2008 03:26 PM UTC:

Muller:

You have my best regards toward your worthwhile effort to publish your
empirical, statistical method for obtaining the material values of pieces
in the ICGA Journal.  My assessment is that it will surely be a much
better paper than the junk [name removed] published in the same journal
regarding piece values.

[The above has been edited to remove a name and/or site reference. It is
the policy of cv.org to avoid mention of that particular name and site to
remove any threat of lawsuits. Sorry to have to do that, but we must
protect ourselves. -D. Howe]

H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, May 3, 2008 03:22 PM UTC:

Sure, this is what people do and have done for ages. It is well known that the advantage of having the move is worth 1/6 of a Pawn, (corresponding in normal Chess to a white score of 53-54%) and that, by inference, wasting a full move is equivalent to 1/3 of a Pawn.

But the point is that this does not alter the piece values. It just adds to them, like every positional advantage adds to them. In my test the advantage of having the lead move is neutralized by playing every position both with white to move and black to move.

💡📝Hans Aberg wrote on Sat, May 3, 2008 11:50 AM UTC:

H.G.Muller:
| As piece values are only useful as strategic guidelines for quiet
| positions, they cannot be sensitive to who has the move.

At the beginning of the game, white is thought to have a slight advantage, and the first task of black will be attempting to neutralize that. And it might be possible set a picee value to that positional advantage, just as when reasoning in terms of getting positional compensation for a sacrifice. Somewhat less han a pawn, perhaps. If one knows about the black/white winning statistics, one might be able to set a value on it that way. It may not be usable for a computer program as it does not change sides, but only computes the relative values of moves.

H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, May 3, 2008 10:34 AM UTC:

As piece values are only useful as strategic guidelines for quiet positions, they cannot be sensitive to who has the move. A position where it matters who has the move is by definition nont quiet, as one ply later that characteristic will have essentially changed. So at the level of piece-value strategies, Chess is a perfectly symmetric game.

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