H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Dec 28, 2018 03:31 PM UTC:
Well, to avoid divergence of the argument, I will limit my current reply to the following observation:
According to your method, you get a value for this '1W-replaces-1F Bishop' which is (somewhat) larger than what you assign to a regular Bishop. Which could actually be correct, because it has almost equal mobility, but is not color bound. But that then is a coincidence, because in no way did you invoke the fact that the W move lifted the color binding. This way you avoided (for totally unclear reasons) to involve the 50% penalty you use in other cases of color binding, and only by virtue of ignoring that penalty you could avoid to be off by a factor 2.
But now start your method from the '1W-replaces-1F Bishop', take away its W step, and give it back its F step. Exactly the same calculation would now apply: removing the W step also reduced the average number of moves to 90%, the F step that you add is also 1/8 of a Guard. But you won't get back the value of the Bishop. Instead the calculated value increases again, to about 3.75 (on 8x8). A correct method should have worked both ways, and predict both the correct value of the 1W-replaces-1F Bishop from the ordinary Bishop, as well as the other way around.
And if you would not have ignored the fact again that removing thw W step causes color binding, you would have ended up with a B value of ~1.9. What sense does it make to have a rule that says you should charge a 50% for color binding, except when you don't feel like it?
Well, to avoid divergence of the argument, I will limit my current reply to the following observation:
According to your method, you get a value for this '1W-replaces-1F Bishop' which is (somewhat) larger than what you assign to a regular Bishop. Which could actually be correct, because it has almost equal mobility, but is not color bound. But that then is a coincidence, because in no way did you invoke the fact that the W move lifted the color binding. This way you avoided (for totally unclear reasons) to involve the 50% penalty you use in other cases of color binding, and only by virtue of ignoring that penalty you could avoid to be off by a factor 2.
But now start your method from the '1W-replaces-1F Bishop', take away its W step, and give it back its F step. Exactly the same calculation would now apply: removing the W step also reduced the average number of moves to 90%, the F step that you add is also 1/8 of a Guard. But you won't get back the value of the Bishop. Instead the calculated value increases again, to about 3.75 (on 8x8). A correct method should have worked both ways, and predict both the correct value of the 1W-replaces-1F Bishop from the ordinary Bishop, as well as the other way around.
And if you would not have ignored the fact again that removing thw W step causes color binding, you would have ended up with a B value of ~1.9. What sense does it make to have a rule that says you should charge a 50% for color binding, except when you don't feel like it?