Kevin Pacey wrote on Wed, Nov 8, 2017 05:37 PM UTC:
What's a bit of a mystery to me is how, long ago, strong players more or less reached agreement on what piece values should be for chess piece types, if we set aside the K's fighting value and the question of fine tuning the fractional part of, say, the exact value of a bishop. I suppose that it was a combination of experience (say based on personal collection of many strong player tournament games, or on individual players trying to apply a piece value system they thought up, until it often seemed to work for them) and intuition (e.g. thinking about various possible endgames).
As far as king stopping a passed pawn possibly being the average case goes, I might be able to take some small comfort from knowing that statistically the average and theoretical case for the result of a game of chess is a draw. Whether that means endgames involving a passed pawn and a chasing K are also normally drawn is an open question. I also wonder whether just a thousand games is anywhere near enough to be an adequate sample in regard to many questions about chess [variants], since the number of possible chess [variant] games is so vast, and the ways of playing a position can at times depend on the players involved (though I've seen somewhere that at the top level in chess, the number of moves in an average game where style can be applied, i.e. in case of more or less equal choices, is shockingly small).
What's a bit of a mystery to me is how, long ago, strong players more or less reached agreement on what piece values should be for chess piece types, if we set aside the K's fighting value and the question of fine tuning the fractional part of, say, the exact value of a bishop. I suppose that it was a combination of experience (say based on personal collection of many strong player tournament games, or on individual players trying to apply a piece value system they thought up, until it often seemed to work for them) and intuition (e.g. thinking about various possible endgames).
As far as king stopping a passed pawn possibly being the average case goes, I might be able to take some small comfort from knowing that statistically the average and theoretical case for the result of a game of chess is a draw. Whether that means endgames involving a passed pawn and a chasing K are also normally drawn is an open question. I also wonder whether just a thousand games is anywhere near enough to be an adequate sample in regard to many questions about chess [variants], since the number of possible chess [variant] games is so vast, and the ways of playing a position can at times depend on the players involved (though I've seen somewhere that at the top level in chess, the number of moves in an average game where style can be applied, i.e. in case of more or less equal choices, is shockingly small).