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H. G. Muller wrote on Mon, Sep 28, 2020 09:22 PM UTC in reply to Aurelian Florea from 01:57 PM:

HG, I am curious about how the joker's power is calculated by the interactive's diagram AI. This seems to me a difficult task.

Now that you mention it, it puzzles me that it gets a value at all. The Diagram determines the piece values by setting up a couple of random positions, and then count the number of moves and captures a piece would have when put on every empty square of these positions. But this is done before any piece was moved, so the Joker should not have any moves at all. Yet it does seem to get a non-zero value.

But I guess the concept of piece value does not apply to the Joker at all, so no matter what value it would get, it would always be wrong. A more sensible approach would be to give the Joker the average value of all pieces of the opponent, or perhaps a weighted average that weights mobile pieces more heavily, as these woould on average be moved more often than others. So something like the sum of the squares of the piece values divided by the sum of the piece values.

But that would just be the instantaneous value of the Joker. And the value of pieces is much dominated by the instantaneous value they would get in the end-game. E.g. in the early middle game Knights and Bishops have usually many more moves than Rooks, yet trading them for a Rook at that stage provides an almost winning advantage. A Joker against just King plus Pawns would be a pretty useless piece.

It seems to me that 3-fold repetition is not detected by the current interactive diagram. Is that true?

That is true. For the purpose of getting a feel for what the game is like this didn't seem needed. The AI is pretty weak, and the human should try to beat it. If the Diagram starts repeating, it is up to the human to deviate, as a draw should be considered a success for the Diagram. The human can decide at any time whether he wants to continue the game, or abandon it.


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