Greg Strong wrote on Thu, Oct 11, 2018 11:06 PM UTC:
I have some more results to report.
I've generated 20 balanced opening positions with the FIDEs vs. the Nutters and another 20 with the colors reversed and run the 400-game test. Here are the results of Nutters against the FIDEs:
Nutty Knights: 272
Fabulous FIDEs: 79
draw: 49
Holy crap!!! That is not at all what I expected. I don't really understand why the Nutters are so dominant, given that their total piece values seem to be about the same. Our piece values could certainly be wrong, of course. But I don't think they are that far off - at least in terms of what a piece is worth in general. In which case, it shows that the true value of a piece really, really matters what else is on the board. I'm guessing they can develop very quickly and very flexibly and get early advantage.
How to fix is a hard question. I've thought about this some and considered a few ideas. The one that "feels" best to me is limiting the range of the Charging Rooks to 4. Essentially, this means that instead of the Charging Rooks being regular Rooks that move backwards as a King, they become Short Rooks that move backwards as a King. I will test this, but I'm certainly open to other thoughts.
Speaking of fixes, I've re-run the FIDEs vs. Clobberers test with the suggested fix - change BD to BnD. Here are the results:
Much better, and probably sufficient for now. Given that we don't know what a lot of evaluation terms should be, the accuracy of these results is limited and this result is probably within the "margin of error" (acknowledging that I am not using that term in the same way that statisticians do.) With this change, I would consider this matchup balanced for all practical purposes.
H.G., I saw your question about what the results would be in pawn odds games. I don't know but I'll work on running that test also.
I have some more results to report.
I've generated 20 balanced opening positions with the FIDEs vs. the Nutters and another 20 with the colors reversed and run the 400-game test. Here are the results of Nutters against the FIDEs:
Holy crap!!! That is not at all what I expected. I don't really understand why the Nutters are so dominant, given that their total piece values seem to be about the same. Our piece values could certainly be wrong, of course. But I don't think they are that far off - at least in terms of what a piece is worth in general. In which case, it shows that the true value of a piece really, really matters what else is on the board. I'm guessing they can develop very quickly and very flexibly and get early advantage.
How to fix is a hard question. I've thought about this some and considered a few ideas. The one that "feels" best to me is limiting the range of the Charging Rooks to 4. Essentially, this means that instead of the Charging Rooks being regular Rooks that move backwards as a King, they become Short Rooks that move backwards as a King. I will test this, but I'm certainly open to other thoughts.
Speaking of fixes, I've re-run the FIDEs vs. Clobberers test with the suggested fix - change BD to BnD. Here are the results:
Much better, and probably sufficient for now. Given that we don't know what a lot of evaluation terms should be, the accuracy of these results is limited and this result is probably within the "margin of error" (acknowledging that I am not using that term in the same way that statisticians do.) With this change, I would consider this matchup balanced for all practical purposes.
H.G., I saw your question about what the results would be in pawn odds games. I don't know but I'll work on running that test also.