Value Nb1?

[Desperado]

I wonder if knight on b1 is worth less than a knight on g1.
Any statistics available ?

For instance after Nc3 and c6 or a6, e6 the knight can't do much. Only protect e4 square.
It may travel to g3 but that costs two moves.

Looks like Ng1 does have lesser problem. Opponent won't play f6. And h6 imeans a weakness. Also less difficult to play d4 for that square is easier to defend.

You could do that with the open chess database standard.
Its an SQL interface and would be perfect for such a statistic.
Out of 80GB of raw game data you can write a simple query.

Pseudocode:
Average number of plies a knight resided on a square per game grouped by the winrate.
This will give you 64 numbers between -1 and 1 which will exactly tell you if a square has a positive or negative impact on the win statistic if it resides there.

Thinking of it this might even perform better than naive implementation of linear regression models like a naive Texel impl (which get stuck in local minima). This method would generate the actual value of a piece per square and not the local optimum found when starting from noise.

If you find this useful please report back with some data!

This is a quite interesting idea, but it is not relevant to the question posed. I don't think he is interested in the value of the knight remaining on b1 or g1 for a long time, that would be very rare and not very interesting, I think he meant the value of the knight that starts on g1 vs the knight that starts on b1. I suppose you could compare the value of a knight on the kingside squares with the knight on the queenside squares for a rough guess, but of course it is not unusual for a knight to switch flanks during the game.

I think it is not very hard to measure as it is done today with every other evaluation feature. The only thing you need to do is to handle both knights as different piece types. Then you tune/measure a general value for Nb1 and Ng1. So, if you have the tools available, the idea is trivial imho.