Re: Tony's positional test suite
Posted: Tue Aug 01, 2017 12:12 pm
From the article:first25plus5 wrote:Something pointed out in Robin Smith’s book “Modern Chess Analysis” (Gambit books, 2004) are ‘ruler flat’ evaluations which indicate fortress draws. (or the evaluation tendency to ‘settle’ approximately so).
This evaluation behavior is further examined in a paper with later engines “Detecting Fortresses in Chess” (Guid & Bratko, 2012).
Example is if an evaluation eventually stabilizes at approximately say +2.24 and maintains this for some time then this behavior strongly indicates a fortress draw, despite a high evaluation for White.
Calling this idea "novel" in 2012 seems dubious, at best. Probably should not comment further...6 CONCLUSIONS
We introduce a novel idea for detecting fortresses in the
game of chess. We demonstrate that a heuristic-searchbased
program is able to detect fortresses on the basis of
backed-up values obtained at different levels of search.
If a particular position is a fortress, the program is not
able to show any progress towards a win and thus the
backed-up values cease to change significantly from a
certain search depth on.