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title: Point Value

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[ Wassily Kandinsky, Points [1] Point Value,

a piece relative value concerning its relative strength in potential exchanges based on human experience and learning. Common rule of thumb are the {1, 3, 3, 5, 9} point values for pawn (1), knight, bishop, rook and queen, also proposed by Claude Shannon in his 1949 paper Programming a Computer for Playing Chess [2] . In the evaluation of a chess program, the balance of material, the aggregated point values for both sides, is usually the most influential term.

Basic values

Measured in units of a fraction of a pawn, for instance the common centipawn scale, allows positional features of the position, worth less than a single pawn, to be evaluated without requiring fractions but a fixed point score. Sample point values from various sources over the time, most were used in concrete chess programs.

| Source | Year | Pawn | Knight | Bishop | Rook | Queen | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | H. S. M. Coxeter [7] | 1940 | | 300 | 350 | 550 | 1000 | | Max Euwe and Hans Kramer [8] | 1944 | 100 | 350 | 350 | 550 | 1000 | | Claude Shannon [9] | 1949 | 100 | 300 | 300 | 500 | 900 | | Alan Turing [10] | 1953 | 100 | 300 | 350 | 500 | 1000 | | Mac Hack [11] | 1967 | 100 | 325 | 350 | 500 | 975 | | Chess 4.5 [12] | 1977 | 100 | 325 | 350 | 500 | 900 | | Tomasz Michniewski [13] | 1995 | 100 | 320 | 330 | 500 | 900 | | Hans Berliner [14] [15] | 1999 | 100 | 320 | 333 | 510 | 880 | | Larry Kaufman [16] | 1999 | 100 | 325 | 325 | 500 | 975 | | Fruit and others [17] | 2005 | 100 | 400 | 400 | 600 | 1200 | | Larry Kaufman [18] | 2012 | 100 | 350 | 350 | 525 | 1000 |

The king value is often assigned a large constant such as 10000 centipaws, which is important to avoid king captures in certain implementations of SEE.

Reciprocal piece values

Concerning a piece controlling a square, its value of attack might be considered as inverse proportional to its point value, which is an issue in aggregating of mobility or square control terms of different pieces.

Samples

Publications

H. M. Taylor (1876). On the Relative Values of the Pieces in Chess. Philosophical Magazine, Series 5, Vol. 1, pp. 221-229
Max Euwe, Hans Kramer (1944, 1977). Het middenspel, deel 1-4. Spectrum, Utrecht
Claude Shannon (1949). Programming a Computer for Playing Chess. Philosophical Magazine, Ser. 7, Vol. 41, No. 314 - March 1950, pdf from The Computer History Museum
Alan Turing (1953). Chess. part of the collection Digital Computers Applied to Games, in Bertram Vivian Bowden (editor), Faster Than Thought, a symposium on digital computing machines, reprinted 1988 in Computer Chess Compendium, reprinted 2004 in The Essential Turing, google books
Jack Good (1968). A Five-Year Plan for Automatic Chess - Appendix F. The Value of the Pieces and Squares. Machine Intelligence Vol. 2
Jens Christensen, Richard Korf (1986). A Unified Theory of Heuristic Evaluation functions and Its Applications to Learning. Proceedings of the AAAI-86, pp. 148-152, pdf
Larry Kaufman (1994). The Relative Value of the Pieces. Computer Chess Reports, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 33
Don Beal, Martin C. Smith (1997). Learning Piece Values Using Temporal Differences. ICCA Journal, Vol. 20, No. 3
Hans Berliner (1999). The System: A World Champion's Approach to Chess. Gambit Publications, ISBN 1-901983-10-2
Sacha Droste, Johannes Fürnkranz (2008). Learning of Piece Values for Chess Variants. Technical Report TUD–KE–2008-07, Knowledge Engineering Group, TU Darmstadt, pdf
Sacha Droste, Johannes Fürnkranz (2008). Learning the Piece Values for three Chess Variants. ICGA Journal, Vol. 31, No. 4
Kunihito Hoki, Tomoyuki Kaneko (2011). The Global Landscape of Objective Functions for the Optimization of Shogi Piece Values with a Game-Tree Search. Advances in Computer Games 13 » Shogi

Forum Posts

1993 ...

deriving piece values from mobility by Barney Pell, rgc, August 09, 1993
Value of the pieces by Joost de Heer, rgc, February 01, 1995 » Influence Quantity of Pieces
Chess in BASIC? by William H. Rogers, CCC, August 28, 1998 » Basic

2000 ...

A Piece Value Question by laocmo, rgcc, January 12, 2000
piece values by Toni, CCC, December 30, 2003
Piece Values in the Endgame by Guy Haworth, CCC, February 11, 2004 » Endgame

External Links

Chess piece relative value from Wikipedia
Centipawn - WikiChess
About the Values of Chess Pieces by Ralph Betza
The joys of chess – and the value of the pieces, ChessBase News, December 21, 2011 [19] [20]

References

↑ Wassily Kandinsky, Points, 1920, Ohara Museum of Art, Google Art Project, Wassily Kandinsky from Wikipedia
↑ Claude Shannon (1949). Programming a Computer for Playing Chess. Philosophical Magazine, Ser. 7, Vol. 41, No. 314 - March 1950
↑ Jack Good (1968). A Five-Year Plan for Automatic Chess - Appendix F. The Value of the Pieces and Squares. Machine Intelligence Vol. 2
↑ H. M. Taylor (1876). On the Relative Values of the Pieces in Chess. Philosophical Magazine, Series 5, Vol. 1, pp. 221-229
↑ H. S. M. Coxeter (1940). Mathematical Recreations and Essays. from the original by W. W. Rouse Ball, Macmillan
↑ Influence Quantity of Pieces - Fibonacci Spiral
↑ see Theoretical Attempt {12, 14, 22, 40} * 25 = {300, 350, 550, 1000}
↑ Max Euwe, Hans Kramer (1944, 1977). Het middenspel, deel 1-4. Spectrum, Utrecht
↑ Claude Shannon (1949). Programming a Computer for Playing Chess. Philosophical Magazine, Ser. 7, Vol. 41, No. 314 - March 1950
↑ Alan Turing (1953). Chess. part of the collection Digital Computers Applied to Games, in Bertram Vivian Bowden (editor), Faster Than Thought, a symposium on digital computing machines, reprinted 1988 in Computer Chess Compendium, reprinted 2004 in The Essential Turing, google books
↑ Richard Greenblatt, Donald Eastlake, Stephen D. Crocker (1967). The Greenblatt Chess Program. Proceedings of the AfiPs Fall Joint Computer Conference, Vol. 31, reprinted (1988) in Computer Chess Compendium, pdf from The Computer History Museum or as pdf or ps from DSpace at MIT
↑ David Slate, Larry Atkin (1977). CHESS 4.5 - The Northwestern University Chess Program. Chess Skill in Man and Machine, reprinted (1988) in Computer Chess Compendium
↑ Simplified Evaluation Function
↑ Hans Berliner (1999). The System: A World Champion's Approach to Chess. Gambit Publications, ISBN 1-901983-10-2
↑ Chess piece value, the Hans Berliner's system from Wikipedia
↑ Larry Kaufman (1999). The Evaluation of Material Imbalances. (first published in Chess Life March 1999, on-line version edited by Dan Heisman)
↑ Re: 2005 National Computer Chess Championships by Shaun Press, Chess Chat, July 17, 2005 » NC3 2005
↑ Re: What is the correct value of the pieces? by Larry Kaufman, CCC, October 10, 2012
↑ Christian Hesse (2011). The Joys of Chess - Heroes, Battles & Brilliancies. ISBN: 978-90-5691-355-7, New In Chess
↑ Interesting article about the value of the pieces by Aloisio Ponti, CCC, December 22, 2011

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