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Total number of unions increases could be 'progress' - a piece can only be released from a union if another piece enters a union, so number of unions cannot go down. in the case that all non-kings are in union, the game must be drawn. 'Progress' is what brings you closer to a win. If you get closer...

Since the kings can't initiate a union, and the only way pieces can leave a union is by another piece initiating a union, only kings in non-union has to be a draw - there's just no way to hug a king anymore.

Regarding repetition though, i don't know that 3-fold repetition is draw is going to work out ok. i.e. imagine the situation where side A threatens to win by moving queen-hugging-bishop into position where it can be chained in for a win. and side B of course moves it away. Obviously if A's position ...

Regarding an evaluation - certain pairs of unions are probably advantageous to one side vs another - i.e. having your queen unioned to a lesser piece or pawn is a penalty as it greatly detracts your ability to set off a winning capture chain that you don't have sole control of your most powerful pie...

Total number of unions increases could be 'progress' - a piece can only be released from a union if another piece enters a union, so number of unions cannot go down. in the case that all non-kings are in union, the game must be drawn.

A few things: 1) A chess engine is a bit more algorithm-oriented than most hobby programming projects you might take on. It makes it a bit more enjoyable for people who like thinking about such things than say... a user interface for anything which is a lot of design work and some very tedious progr...

Nothing wrong with partitioning a long function into distinct subfunctions and then call them in sequence in the main eval. Some would even call it a good practice to do so - but what you linked has nothing to do with that.

While I'm probably going to regret replying to this... The main issue is you're taking a solution and going looking for a problem. What do you find unmanageable about your current evaluation and how does this address it to make it more manageable? Nothing about a tree structure with a variety of nod...

Stockfish apparently does this too, per the comment "Second-degree polynomial material imbalance by Tord Romstad." Could someone please explain how this works and/or point me to something that would? Thanks. I think Tord's inspiration came from the bishop pair bonus and the various imbalance/scalin...

A hash table can contain several millions of entries. So a pgn file seems not to be a good container for it. Also there are a lot of other drawbacks. Pgn databases can also contain millions of games and even more positions. But I was thinking mainly to save only parts of the hash (by material "slic...