so, regarding my FEN position, where i state b4! should be the best move, it seems that most engines judge at first not to consider this move to be in the top 20 of MultiPV. However a human can see the Bc5 is overstretched : when it captures the b4 pawn, the square g1 is no longer covered and White can play Rg1! and reach a good (?!) attacking position, although a pawn is lost .. How does the engine evaluate ? Does it only count material ? I guess modern engines do not. It's all about options, therefor all pieces should be on "good squares" .. i guess you know what i mean, as a chess player .. so, what is a "good square" ? As i stated, the asmFish engine finds b4! within 20 MultiPV, and is rather fast. It's calculation / evaluation / judging which move will be in the top # MultiPV / seems different.
How does an engine evaluate any position ? You can point me to the existing tree search methods and "the way evaluation works", but can we try to create alternative evaluation scores ? Eg.
amount of pawns
amount of double pawns
amount of squares a piece can reach in a concerning position
amount of squares a piece can reach in a concerning position, as a percentage of the max (according to our chess rules), for example:
max_square( piece=Knight, square=e5) is 8
max_square( piece=Knight, square=a1) is 2
regarding pawn structure : how many rows for each pawn to promote
regarding the pieces Bishop, Rook and Queen, which can all move a long range, we should consider all the squares in between the from-square and the to-square : some kind of "pressure" factor for each square should exist (occupied by some piece, the line is blocked).
etc.
Some engines introduce some King Safety factor .. is this alike ?
I think i understand the general coding of an engine, with (recursive) depth etc., but i never build one.
Many test FEN positions exist, but how can a programmer use the output to tune and code new parameters to create a (more) suitable evaluation ? Now, you can tell me about min-max etc. but what about alternative evaluation scores in the first place ..
Who can elaborate on that ?
[ some new patterns ..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crgEYMsg7sY ]