Please share your well-founded analysis of that position with us (with me), and please explain why you say that the queens will be "slaughtered". Have you written a program specialized for such kind of positions that finds the "truth" better than today's strongest chess engines?hgm wrote:Another good example that shows how drastically piece values are altered when there is no promise of an end-game is of course the Knights vs Queens position:
[d]1q1qk1q1/3ppp2/8/8/8/1NN2NN1/3PPP2/2NNKN2 w - -
The Queens are slaughtered, because they have no easy way to trade down to an end-game. So the Knights can exploit their higher middle-game value compared to Queen indefinitely. so 7 Knights (classical piece value 21) beat 3 Queens (classical value 27) easily.
It may be true that the queen side has no easy way to trade down to endgame. But why does that make the position won for white? It could be a draw, if the best that white can enforce is to trade something like NNN vs QP. It still needs a proof that white can enforce winning each queen for not more than two knights.
In my opinion the position *could* be close to a draw, although I see no way for me to really analyze it properly.
Clearly the large number of knights would require a well-tuned material imbalance function (or table), since even the positional penalties for highly restricted queen mobility due to many squares being controlled by knights will usually not be sufficient to correctly evaluate that situation. However, I doubt that many strong engines include such specialized knowledge since positions with seven knights of one color do not occur in practical game play so adding that knowledge does not add elo points. You know that this is an important argument for many of us.
If the requirements are different from "elo gain" then for me the solution is still based on the "imbalance" functionality and not much related to the basic settings of the material values. The latter are just a starting point matching sufficiently enough "real" chess positions, while it is clear that you can also define examples like this one where these material values fail miserably without additional mechanisms like "imbalance". In middlegame, three knights might roughly equalize one queen, but maybe the equivalent for two queens is already closer to five than to six knights. Are there any "scientific" data about that?
Also I can't follow your statement about the "higher middlegame value of knights compared to queens". Your example only shows that the combination of many knights creates additional power but when leaving your very special example, one queen is still much stronger than a knight even in middlegame, in the vast majority of "real" standard chess cases.
Sven