Evaluation evaluation

Last time I thought about the evaluation part of the engine. This part is responsible for returning an absolute score for a certain position. Here all the chess specific knowledge is contained. The engine must be able to see whether a certain position is in favor for white or black, so it knows which position it should avoid and which positions it should play towards to.

Easy evaluation terms are material based. The side with more material has an advantage. The bigger the material difference the higher the advantage. But even material becomes difficult when you try to fine tune that.

Example question: What is better, a queen or two rooks ?

The answer depends on the other material on the board, if there are a lot of pawns on the board, the queen might be superior because the rook paths are blocked. If there are only a few paws on the board the rooks gain a lot of strength.

A queen that is not opposed by a bishop pair is stronger than one were the opponent still possess the bishop pair.

So to tune the evaluation is probably the must difficult part and also the part the engine gets its personality from. What focus I give on certain terms will determine the engine play, so it is quite an interesting subject.

For the programming I maintain a header file with all the evaluation terms and scores associated. This is very time consuming to maintain especially if you want to have a nice code formatting.

I started to maintain the evaluation terms in a Excel and wrote a Visual Basic macro that exports the terms into c++ code. This is really helpful.

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