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Kevin Pacey wrote on Thu, Sep 27, 2018 04:32 PM UTC:

Hi H.G.

I did note in my (unchanged) Edit sentence just above the values that I gave (in my second last post in this thread) that my memory had been rather off, though I could have been more explicit about that pretty much negating my earlier remarks in the text about the ranking of the armies as I recalled it. A natural aversion to my eating crow, I suppose. :)

The effectiveness with which an army works together is indeed not necessarily reflected by the material sum of its parts.

I was happy many of our values for pieces of the 4 armies seemed relatively close to each other, with some notable exceptions (perhaps especially the Cardinal, Colonel and Short Rook). I can see how I might have underestimated a Cardinal (on 8x8 at least) since my primative formulas for valuations don't account for a Cardinal's great concentration of power within a 2 square radius around it, covering the same number of squares as a Chancellor or Queen would.

I still rate a knight as microscopically worse than a bishop on average, though I didn't bother to say so explicitly in my recent post on CWDA values. At least two chess grandmasters that have been in my area (besides some advanced chess books I read long ago) note that once a B is gone, it's harder to cover squares of its colour. I'd say that's since a knight takes at least two moves to cover a square of the same colour it wasn't already, whereas a B might often take only one move to do so. There is also that a B can sometimes trap a N against an edge of the board in an endgame. Of course, there are many other things to consider, but these things are what chessplayers have recently pointed out to me. Then there's my still not being 100% trusting of computer statistical studies/methodologies, but at times that comes down to vague doubts and my own intuition/studies as a chess player.

 


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