Exactly. Just think of standing pat as additional move that you must search, but of course standing path terminates the search. So if you have 2 captures your options are:stevemulligan wrote:Ahh, I get it now. And all it took for me to understand was 5 different explanations from 5 different people /sigh Many thanks to everyone for having patience.kbhearn wrote:The point is that if no capture is an improvement, taking the best bad capture is not an accurate representation of the position, because the bad capture does not need to be made, a noncapture can be played.
I see now that qsearch needs to stand pat, and it does so by relying on a (very safe) 'guess' there is a better non-capture. I should have realized the score of any captures after b3c3 were useless.
1. stand pat
2. try the first capture.
3. try the second capture.
stand pat may be the best move, or else one of the captures may be the best move - that is for the search to determine. The only difference in stand pat from other moves is that it is never expanded, you don't stand pat and then let the other side try captures because by definition stand pat means to stop.