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H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Sep 16, 2016 12:12 PM UTC:

No trouble at all. I am glad you detected this double-push bug.

I think it would benefit Fairy-Max' strategy when you assign the piece values such that the minors have values just above 256, Rooks 400-500, super-pieces starting just above 768. There is no harm in lowering the Pawn value to around 60. If you set the values much higher Fairy-Max will be to slow in recognizing the end-game started and it should involve its King, and too reluctant to push Pawns in the opening.

I think Fairy-Max could be a very useful tool to determine piece values, despite the problem that it cannot implement the exact promotion rule. Because piece values will not be very dependent on the promotion rule. So you could for instance play from a start position where white has to Griffins, and black two Aancas, and see which side wins more often, to determine if the Aanca or the Griffin is the stronger piece on this board. If, say, the Griffins would win this convincingly, you could remove one of their Pawns from the start position, to see if that is enough to flip the odds.

With your latest promotion rules it becomes kind of hard to decide what should be Fairy-Max' default promotion choice, as it would probably still be better on average to always promote to minor on 8th than to always defer there and take a Rook on 9th. But since the minors are all very close in value in Apothecary 2, it would depend very much on the situation which one would be best. But I would go for the Bishop, as, being a slider, this has the biggest chance to stop an enemy promotion in case of a promotion race.


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