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ChessVA computer program
. Program for playing numerous Chess variants against your PC.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
📝Greg Strong wrote on Fri, Jan 5, 2018 12:35 AM UTC:

Ok, I think I'm now going to tackle these related issues of detecting draw by insufficient material and scaling down the evaluation of positions that are likely drawn due to the material present.

As a first step, I'm going to code a material hashtable so this detection won't be too slow.  Although the page on the chess programming wiki only describes tracking the number of each type of piece per player, it seems you also want to track colorbound pieces of each type separately...  KBBK is a draw if they bishops are on the same color, otherwise it isn't.  So it seems for these purposes, a black bishop on light squares should be considered a different type of piece from a black bishop on dark squares.  Fortunately, ChessV already detects which pieces are colorbound automatically, as well as how many different "colors" each has (which internally I call "slices" so as not to confuse the different meanings of colors.)