On Oct 14, 1:09 pm, johnnyt wrote:
Petrovitch wrote:
Knights have been evaulated as 3 points. A rating difference of 100
points means a player should win 5:8 games. In relative value, how
much is a knight worth in rating points? And the other pieces?

If a player is 100 points higher should he be able to win with a
(pawn, 2 pawns, knight, etc.) advantage?

As I understand, the value is different based on the understanding of
the weaker player. Rather than just raw difference.

However, there has been vsrioud odds matched between strong GM's and
Rybka in the past year, and there has been some discussion about them on
Rybka's (www.rybkachess.com) website.


One thing I noticed in replaying the games between
Rybka and GM Benjamin is that the program was not
designed or configured properly to make best use of
such odds. In most cases, the human was able to
successfully steer into "book opening" positions where
the missing pawn was a major handicap, yet Rybka
won the match in spite of this fact.

At lower levels of play, there are so many errors
that a handicap of QN may well be overcome by a
very strong player over the course of many moves,
but the higher you go, the more important it is to not
be in "a lost endgame" at the end of every exchange
of pieces.

For example, I would feel reasonably comfortable
playing Rybka at Queen odds, because I know that
the program has not been properly programmed to
compensate for this titanic handicap, so it is not
the same dangerous opponent it would be in more
normal types of positions.

Those players who advocate time-odds want to
keep the character of the game the same, and this
is the simplest way to achieve that end. However,
in many cases the much weaker player will not
make good use of his extra time, and so the
stronger player is giving a sort of "fake" odds, in
one sense; I have seen massive time odds where
in the end, the weaker player is the one in time
pressure (these are the type of players who attract
offers of massive time odds, since it doesn't really
help them very much).

Another issue is an unwillingness to surrender
the detailed knowledge of the opening, the heavy
study of chess openings theory, and again I smell
a rat; top players spend an inordinate amount of
time on the study of openings theory, and in some
lines no amount of additional time OTB is going to
enough to unravel the intricacies, so the receiver
of a time handicap will squander his edge in a vain
attempt to jump to the moon, wearing just his
sneakers.

I want to see Rybka playing IMs at Knight odds,
followed by weak GMs and then, ultimately,
stronger GMs. But first they need to stop mucking
it up the way they did with GM Benjamin; figure out
what contempt factor and other settings will improve,
rather than handicap the program's play.


-- help bot