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[Lucas Braesch]

I've come across something rather disconcerting in developping DoubleCheck's evaluation. Knight/Bishop outposts give me an elo regression, rather than an improvement. And I've tried so many different conditions (outposted knight/bishop can'e be kicked by a pawn, isn't attacked by a pawn, can't be exchanged by a knight immediately, or can't be exchanged by a minor at all). All these variations gave me an elo regression, even at fixed node testing (which advantages the outpost feature, since it doesn't account for the loss of time in outpost calculations).

So I thought, maybe something is wrong in DoubleCheck.. But then I realized that this feature is partially redundant with PST, King Safety, and Mobility. And perhaps even pawn eval if one has some penalty for holes in the pawn structure.

So I thought I should try removing it in Stockfish to see what happens. I'm currently running a test with/without (10,000 games in 3"+0.1" using SF's book up to depth 8). Will post the result when it comes out.

But I'm really surprised by this. Anyone noticed the same thing in their engine ?