Beautiful Mates : Applying Principles of Beauty to Computer Chess Heuristics

by Walls, Ben P.

• ISBN13: 9781581120097
• ISBN10: 1581120095
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-12-01
• Publisher: Lightning Source Inc

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 5
Why Games and Why Chess?	p. 7
Game Characteristics	p. 7
The Suitability of Chess	p. 7
Checkers	p. 8
Go	p. 8
Chosen Game	p. 9
A Brief History of Computer Chess	p. 10
Machack	p. 10
Chess 3.0	p. 11
Cray Blitz	p. 12
Belle	p. 12
Hitech	p. 13
The 'Deep' Range	p. 13
How Computers Play Chess	p. 15
Machine Representation of the Chess Board	p. 15
The Move Generator	p. 15
Evaluation	p. 16
Piece Ratio Exchange	p. 17
Search	p. 17
Pruning the Search	p. 18
Horizon effect	p. 18
Techniques for Improving search	p. 18
Opening Books	p. 19
Endgame database	p. 19
Killer Moves	p. 19
Transposition Tables	p. 20
Human Chess Playing Methods	p. 21
Perception	p. 21
Chunks	p. 22
Contrasting Human and Computer Methods	p. 23
Principles of Beauty	p. 25
Successfully Violate Heuristics	p. 25
Use the Weakest Possible Piece	p. 26
Use All of the Piece's Power	p. 26
Give More Aesthetic Weight to the Critical Pieces	p. 27
Use One Giant Piece in Place of Several Minor Pieces	p. 28
Employ Themes	p. 28
Avoid Bland Stereotopy	p. 29
Neither Strangeness nor difficulty produce beauty	p. 30
A Discussion of Margulies' Paper	p. 31
Applying Margulies Principles to Chess Puzzles	p. 32
Accepted Principles	p. 32
Rejected Principles	p. 33
All Pieces	p. 34
Implementing Heuristics in Chess	p. 35
Standard Heuristics	p. 35
Beauty Heuristics	p. 36
The Program	p. 37
Object Orientated Design	p. 37
Output data	p. 38
Favoured Moves and the '[lambda]' Parameter	p. 39
Improved Results from 'Favoured Moves'	p. 40
Testing	p. 40
Complexity in Mating Problems	p. 41
Source of Test Data	p. 41
Method of Testing	p. 42
Standard Deviation	p. 43
Results	p. 44
Results for twenty two puzzlies	p. 45
Chosen Problems	p. 47
Mate in 2 problems	p. 48
Mate in 3 problems	p. 49
Two extra Mate in 4 and 5 problems	p. 50
Results for Twenty two problems (with 'Favoured Moves')	p. 52
Chosen Problems (with 'Favoured Moves')	p. 54
Mate in 2 problems (with 'Favoured Moves')	p. 55
Mate in 3 problems (with 'Favoured Moves')	p. 56
Two extra Mate in 4 and 5 problems (with 'Favoured Moves')	p. 57
Factors Arrising From the Results	p. 58
Complexity	p. 58
Performance of Individual Heuristics	p. 60
Aggression	p. 61
Conclusion	p. 62
Bibliography	p. 64
The Chess Board	p. 69
Computer Representation	p. 71
Heuristics	p. 73
Sample Text Output	p. 76
Summary Tables	p. 80
All the Puzzles in Detail	p. 83
Tables of Results	p. 108
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