H. G. Muller wrote on Sun, May 19, 2019 08:45 PM UTC:
That's indeed great news! I haven't been able to do any further work on KingSlayer yet; this entire weekend I spent at the semi-annual tournament of the Dutch Computer Chess Association where my engine Spartacus scored 0 out of 7...). Now that most of the end-games have been solved, I am ready to progress with that. 'Army picking' is an issue that I have no clear idea on how exactly to implement, though. Of course I want the engine to be able to do games between all the standard armies, controlled by the CECP name of the (sub-)variant (like cwda~nutters~fide).
But I want it to be able to do more than that, because my main reason for converting KingSlayer was to be able to improve the accuracy of piece-value measurements over what Fairy-Max was capable of, by taking into account pair bonuses and mating potential in the eval, and providing a generally better level of play (to be exploited by being able to do more games of the same quality in the same time). For this reason I want to embed pieces in armies to which they do not belong, so that they are part of the only imbalance in otherwise symmetric setups. This requires 5 piece types per player (plus Pawns plus King), which should not be a major problem, since the internal piece encoding uses 3 bits for piece type (while white and black pieces are independently specified), code 0 being reserved for empty squares.
So I would need some manner to specify 5 pieces for each side, taken from the total collection of all supported pieces, independently. This would not be so much of a problem for properties of a single piece, (such as value, mating potential or color binding) which could just be copied from a table. But it is more problematic to get properties concerning multiple pieces, such as the winning prospects of 5-men end-games. If armies can be arbitrarily composed there would be 16000 of those (for 5 armies), most of which I have not calculated yet because they would consist of unnatural or impossible combination. And I want to be able to test pieces not in any of these armies as well (such as R3, RF).
Perhaps the best method would be to program a heuristic for determining the winning-prospects based on the individual properties of the participating pieces (piece value, mating potential, color binding) that roughly captures the general trends that were revealed by the EGT generation I did so far, and then supplement that with a list of exceptions located in an external file. To be fully accurate it would be enough to only have the exceptions in that file that can occur with the piece sets currently in use (which, for unconventional combinations, could be calculated by EGT generation for the purpose, if not yet available).
Perhaps I should define a general variant 'cwda', which would be entirely configurable through an external file, the latter containing the info which of the programmed pieces occur in either army, and under which single-letter ID. Where piece number 1-20 are those of the 5 standard armies, (hard-coded in KingSlayer) and 21-26 would be configurable through the same file (as any combination of possibly divergent finite-range slides).
That's indeed great news! I haven't been able to do any further work on KingSlayer yet; this entire weekend I spent at the semi-annual tournament of the Dutch Computer Chess Association where my engine Spartacus scored 0 out of 7...). Now that most of the end-games have been solved, I am ready to progress with that. 'Army picking' is an issue that I have no clear idea on how exactly to implement, though. Of course I want the engine to be able to do games between all the standard armies, controlled by the CECP name of the (sub-)variant (like cwda~nutters~fide).
But I want it to be able to do more than that, because my main reason for converting KingSlayer was to be able to improve the accuracy of piece-value measurements over what Fairy-Max was capable of, by taking into account pair bonuses and mating potential in the eval, and providing a generally better level of play (to be exploited by being able to do more games of the same quality in the same time). For this reason I want to embed pieces in armies to which they do not belong, so that they are part of the only imbalance in otherwise symmetric setups. This requires 5 piece types per player (plus Pawns plus King), which should not be a major problem, since the internal piece encoding uses 3 bits for piece type (while white and black pieces are independently specified), code 0 being reserved for empty squares.
So I would need some manner to specify 5 pieces for each side, taken from the total collection of all supported pieces, independently. This would not be so much of a problem for properties of a single piece, (such as value, mating potential or color binding) which could just be copied from a table. But it is more problematic to get properties concerning multiple pieces, such as the winning prospects of 5-men end-games. If armies can be arbitrarily composed there would be 16000 of those (for 5 armies), most of which I have not calculated yet because they would consist of unnatural or impossible combination. And I want to be able to test pieces not in any of these armies as well (such as R3, RF).
Perhaps the best method would be to program a heuristic for determining the winning-prospects based on the individual properties of the participating pieces (piece value, mating potential, color binding) that roughly captures the general trends that were revealed by the EGT generation I did so far, and then supplement that with a list of exceptions located in an external file. To be fully accurate it would be enough to only have the exceptions in that file that can occur with the piece sets currently in use (which, for unconventional combinations, could be calculated by EGT generation for the purpose, if not yet available).
Perhaps I should define a general variant 'cwda', which would be entirely configurable through an external file, the latter containing the info which of the programmed pieces occur in either army, and under which single-letter ID. Where piece number 1-20 are those of the 5 standard armies, (hard-coded in KingSlayer) and 21-26 would be configurable through the same file (as any combination of possibly divergent finite-range slides).