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Subject: An idea: Offensive and defensive mobility

Author: Tord Romstad

Date: 07:49:11 02/06/04


The ongoing discussion about mobility evaluation has given me a new idea
which could perhaps be of interest to some:

One of the many difficult problems in mobility evaluation is to decide, for
each square a piece can move to without getting captured, how big a bonus one
should give for being able to move there.  One of the main criterions I use
is whether the piece would contribute to the attack of the enemy king or the
defense of the friendly king from the square.  This helps my engine to
notice attacking potential some time before the attack materializes on the
board.  I also give an extra mobility bonus for pieces which have the potential
to do more than one task, for instance if the piece can move to squares where
it attacks the enemy king *and* to squares where it defends the friendly king.

My new idea is this:  Why not compute two different mobility scores for each
side?  It seems more flexible to compute a separate "offensive mobility" and
"defensive mobility" for every piece.  One could then use other components
of the eval to decide upon the weightings for offensive vs. defensive mobility
for each side.

Has anybody tried something like this before?  How well does it work?

Tord





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