Title
An evolutionary algorithm with a history mechanism for tuning a chess evaluation function
Abstract
Here, we propose an evolutionary algorithm (i.e., evolutionary programming) for tuning the weights of a chess engine. Most of the previous work in this area has normally adopted co-evolution (i.e., tournaments among virtual players) to decide which players will pass to the following generation, depending on the outcome of each game. In contrast, our proposed method uses evolution to decide which virtual players will pass to the next generation based on the number of positions solved from a number of chess grandmaster games. Using a search depth of 1-ply, our method can solve 40.78% of the positions evaluated from chess grandmaster games (this value is higher than the one reported in the previous related work). Additionally, our method is capable of solving 53.08% of the positions using a historical mechanism that keeps a record of the ''good'' virtual players found during the evolutionary process. Our proposal has also been able to increase the competition level of our search engine, when playing against the program Chessmaster (grandmaster edition). Our chess engine reached a rating of 2404 points for the best virtual player with supervised learning, and a rating of 2442 points for the best virtual player with unsupervised learning. Finally, it is also worth mentioning that our results indicate that the piece material values obtained by our approach are similar to the values known from chess theory.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1016/j.asoc.2013.02.015
Appl. Soft Comput.
Keywords
Field
DocType
evolutionary process,chess engine,grandmaster edition,chess grandmaster game,chess evaluation function,virtual player,evolutionary algorithm,search engine,evolutionary programming,history mechanism,chess theory,artificial intelligence
Chess theory,Search engine,Evolutionary algorithm,Computer science,Evaluation function,Supervised learning,Transposition table,Unsupervised learning,Artificial intelligence,Evolutionary programming,Machine learning
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
13
7
1568-4946
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.38
16
Authors
3