H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Oct 12, 2018 06:18 PM UTC:
It occurred to me that the Nutters are unique amongst Betza's armies in their forward-backward asymmetry. I wonder if this could have an unexpected effect on the outcome of self-play games of engines with an evaluation that is not highly tuned. In a random mover Nutter pieces would tend to diffuse forward. Perhaps this makes the nutters a bit more aggressive than the others, which would benefit them if the others are not aggressive enough. Perhaps the others would benefit from a piece-square table with a larger forward-gradient, while the Nutters automatically play like they have one.
On two occasions I noticed issues that could be related. In Fairy-Max white seems to play better than black, even when I average out the first-move advantage by having black start in half the games. This must be due to the direction the board is scanned during move generation; for white this typically first encounters the Pawns, for black the pieces. So if a Pawn move and a piece move have equal score, white would likely play the Pawn move, black the piece move. As Pawn moves are always forward, this makes white play more aggressively.
The second case was when I was measuring the value of KNAD. I was not sure whether it would be good to give a bonus for centralizing such a valuable piece, so I did the measurement both with a neutral PST and a centralizing PST for the KNAD. In the latter case the KNAD cae out about 1 Pawn more valuable! Normally misconceptions on the evaluation (such as the piece value) hardly affect the outcome of such measurements, as long as both players share the misconception. But not in this case. Without an incentive to centralize the side with the KNAD too often left it unused, in a place where the profitable things it could do stayed beyond the horizon.So strategic errors only one side can make (because of the imbalance) can affect the outcome.
It occurred to me that the Nutters are unique amongst Betza's armies in their forward-backward asymmetry. I wonder if this could have an unexpected effect on the outcome of self-play games of engines with an evaluation that is not highly tuned. In a random mover Nutter pieces would tend to diffuse forward. Perhaps this makes the nutters a bit more aggressive than the others, which would benefit them if the others are not aggressive enough. Perhaps the others would benefit from a piece-square table with a larger forward-gradient, while the Nutters automatically play like they have one.
On two occasions I noticed issues that could be related. In Fairy-Max white seems to play better than black, even when I average out the first-move advantage by having black start in half the games. This must be due to the direction the board is scanned during move generation; for white this typically first encounters the Pawns, for black the pieces. So if a Pawn move and a piece move have equal score, white would likely play the Pawn move, black the piece move. As Pawn moves are always forward, this makes white play more aggressively.
The second case was when I was measuring the value of KNAD. I was not sure whether it would be good to give a bonus for centralizing such a valuable piece, so I did the measurement both with a neutral PST and a centralizing PST for the KNAD. In the latter case the KNAD cae out about 1 Pawn more valuable! Normally misconceptions on the evaluation (such as the piece value) hardly affect the outcome of such measurements, as long as both players share the misconception. But not in this case. Without an incentive to centralize the side with the KNAD too often left it unused, in a place where the profitable things it could do stayed beyond the horizon.So strategic errors only one side can make (because of the imbalance) can affect the outcome.