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Influence of Search Depth on Position Evaluation

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Advances in Computer Games (ACG 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10664))

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Abstract

By using a well-known chess program and a large data set of chess positions from real games we demonstrate empirically that with increasing search depth backed-up evaluations of won positions tend to increase, while backed-up evaluations of lost positions tend to decrease. We show three implications of this phenomenon in practice and in the theory of computer game playing. First, we show that heuristic evaluations obtained by searching to different search depths are not directly comparable. Second, we show that fewer decision changes with deeper search are a direct consequence of this property of heuristic evaluation functions. Third, we demonstrate that knowing this property may be used to develop a method for detecting fortresses in chess, which is an unsolved task in computer chess.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Of course, this is only an approximation: The terms “decisive advantage”, “large advantage”, and “small advantage” are not strictly defined in the literature.

  2. 2.

    Stockfish 8 64-bit was used in the experiment. In the original study, the programs Rybka 3 and Houdini 1.5a x64 searched a subset of 12 positions up to 20 plies [23].

  3. 3.

    The solutions to the problems given in Fig. 7 are 1.Ba4+!! Kxa4 2.b3+! Kb5 3.c4+! Kc6 4.d5+! Kd7 5.e6+! Kxd8 6.f5! (with a draw), and 1.Rxb7!! (1.Rxf7? g3!) 1...Rf8 (1...Rxb7 2. g3! Kg5 3.Ke2 Rb6 4.Kf1!) 2.g3! Kg6 3.Rb6+! Kg7 4.Rh6!! Kxh6 5.Ke2 Kg5 6.Kf1! Rh8 7.Kg2 a3 8.Kg1! Ra8 9.Kg2 Ra4 10.Kf1! (with a draw), respectively. The latter study was conceived by GM Miguel Illescas.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

    Matej Guid & Ivan Bratko

Authors
  1. Matej Guid
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  2. Ivan Bratko
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Correspondence to Matej Guid .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Data Science and Knowledge Engineering, Maastricht University, Maastricht, Limburg, The Netherlands

    Mark H.M. Winands

  2. Leiden Centre of Data Science, Leiden University, Leiden, Zuid-Holland, The Netherlands

    H. Jaap van den Herik

  3. Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University, Leiden, Zuid-Holland, The Netherlands

    Walter A. Kosters

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Guid, M., Bratko, I. (2017). Influence of Search Depth on Position Evaluation. In: Winands, M., van den Herik, H., Kosters, W. (eds) Advances in Computer Games. ACG 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10664. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71649-7_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71649-7_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-71648-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-71649-7

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