Flashy, but trashy chess

[sje]

Flashy, but trashy chess

From the 19th century we have many tales of swashbuckling chess players who've played and won brilliantly in spite of using unsound openings. How might one write a program which would do the same against human opponents?

NSFW vocabulary: http://boingboing.net/2015/10/26/how-to ... -assh.html

[mhull]

Flashy, but trashy chess

From the 19th century we have many tales of swashbuckling chess players who've played and won brilliantly in spite of using unsound openings. How might one write a program which would do the same against human opponents?

NSFW vocabulary: http://boingboing.net/2015/10/26/how-to ... -assh.html

Perhaps giving some preference for a "principle variation" where the position at the end of the PV is better (static eval-wise) than the position at the first, AND the intervening positions (static eval at each move in the PV) evaluate lower than both.

Or some variation thereof.

[AlvaroBegue]

After introducing a lot of positional terms in its evaluation function, my Spanish checkers program developed a habit of inventing gambits. They generally ended in draws if the opponent defended correctly, but the games were very entertaining. We ended up re-scaling all the positional terms by some factor (75%, maybe?) to make it have a more balanced style.

So perhaps just reducing the relative value of material with respect to positional terms in the evaluation function might give engines a more romantic style. Has anyone tried something like that?

[PK]

Some tricks serving that purpose are implemented in Rodent 1.7

(http://www.pkoziol.cal24.pl/rodent/rodent_download.htm)

Whereas I am not completely happy with the result, this is what might help:

- indeed, scaling down material values works as a charm. Rodent scaling material to 90% sacks pawns quite routinely, also when on the defensive (as if it has seen too many games of young Garry Kasparov). And it is just as strong as default version! Go down a little bit more, and strength goes down, but entertainment value goes up.

- there is a good old idea of king tropism (values taken from Gambit Fruit). The more pieces around enemy king, the merrier! Values up to 100% do not weaken my engine, while changing its style completely. Defalult uses 20 or 25% IIRC

- Rodent 1.7 can value own attack over enemy attack and own mobility over enemy mobility. If it does so, you get an attacker. But if it overvalues own attack and enemy mobility at the same time, you get a really sneaky bastard of an opponent! Values up to 125% are more or less normal and don't hurt playing strength too much.