[stouset]

Sure a computer can, conceptually. But they don’t, at least not in the way we generally do.

Traditional engines have been designed under the premise that it’s better to have an extremely fast evaluation function you can apply deeply down the tree than it is to have a slower, more thorough evaluation function you can’t apply to as many nodes. Any extra processing budget is spent on more intelligent pruning of the tree of moves that don’t appear likely to yield anything promising.

So an engine will look at a position like this, see that it has a sizable material advantage, and doesn’t give as much weight to the obvious positional conclusion that it has no productive path forward. It also won’t understand that “just” sacrificing a pawn turns the position into one that’s completely lost due to the chain of passed pawns it eventually results in.

Yes, the engine could be improved to understand this type of position, but without extreme care that easily results in it taking longer to evaluate every other position. The net effect is an overall weaker engine, unless you find a way to improve the evaluation without slowing down the evaluation function.

[klmadfejno]

> Traditional engines

That's the crux of it though isn't it? These are complaints about a specific approach, not generally of computers, and not even of the best demonstrated models.

I'm also not entirely sure this is the correct way to think about it. If the function to evaluate the accept-a-draw decision is separate from the next-move decision. Then if the accept-a-draw is refused, doing the poor pawn sacrifice is, without question, the best available move. My interpretation is that the accept-a-draw is made in a vacuum here.