| I've always wanted to do something similar! I've thought about trying to consider the "obviousness" of certain moves, and then only explore those branches with a probability relative to its obviousness. "Obviousness" would take into account things like the last move played ("ah, your pawn is attacking my bishop; I should move it"), and whether the move is a capture, check, or attacks another piece. A forward move for a knight is more obvious than a backward move, as is moving it towards the center of the board, versus moving it to the edge of board. As the depth increases, the probability of exploring a branch decreases. I think it would be pretty easy to scale such a system to make it play better or worse by simply adjusting how much the probability of exploring a branch decreases as the depth increases. Perhaps this could lead to more natural blunders where a line is simply missed? I've also wanted to come up with an evaluation system that scales better with skill level. A position may be +3, but only if you play the next 5 moves exactly correctly. In another position, one move might be +1, and another might be +0.5, but the +0.5 requires four moves of perfect play from your opponent to keep it even. Can these subtleties be expressed clearly? Maybe something like "turns until positional advantage is converted to a clear material advantage." When you're just starting engine evaluations often don't make any sense. I've watched a lot of chess on Twitch lately, and it'd also be cool to have scores for all the relatively-subjective terms that the commentators use: "lots of attacking chances" (just pure count of checks possible in next N moves? percentage of lines that lead to checkmate in next N moves?), "very sharp position" (how many moves drastically change the evaluation?), etc. |