I teach along these lines, to consider net difference in activity as a higher-level version of Makogonov's famous rule "Improve the position of your worst-placed piece". Often exchanging an opponent's best piece, or preventing significant improvement of an opponent's piece is the most effective way to increase net difference in activity than to improve one's own piece activity.
(Attacked Squares) + (Attacked Squares in Opponent's Half) +
(Attacked Squares around Opponent's King)
I like these components. This artcle stimulates me to keep working on a more abstract versoin of piece activity, let's say potential activity. But if one were to get a derived version for a full legal position, then I do think these notions would be pressure components to include. not done reading. I hope this will be on lichess, too. I think you are doing exactly the kind of chess theory I thought has been missing.
As these are measure one would apply not in the one play mode games, not as such, but for chess study and theories of chess study (learning). many heads at it, and many games characterisation not necessary bound to the single game decision sequence problem on one indidivual, but putting some structure in the accumluating databases for high level concept to be better defined and shareable without having to be first an expert to talk about the same things. This is not going to make anyone having knowledge advantage in their own improvement track vision of chess, well it might if we the many start digested the accumulated data, for its emerging "logic". Eventually having other means to pull on the mass of data than which first moves got to a specific position, would allow some more theories of learning to be developped, (it might need other types of scientific sources or well definted models of the learner "mechanisms") and then maybe more rational ways of extending existing thoeries of conscious learning, into more conscious theories of subsoncsious learning, The experience does not have to be headless chicken random picking, that might spuriously cluster (if we had no such metrics or components metrics to characterize expeirence). What would unifrom random even mean.
Another idea would be judge pawn structure. I guess N1 would be front line pawns being guarded at all, N2 would be "piece activity" score(as defined in the post - no pawns counted) and a couple of other factors might make up an informative ensemble.
Reminds me of a class in stats - an ensemble is always better IF* every estimator is more accurate than random chance.
* - and look at games from different people, and those people don't have access to the internet but whatever
I didn't count pawns because it seemed to morph into evaluating the structure and not only the piece activity. There are certainly better and more sophisticated ways to calculate piece activity, but the problem is that it's hard to say when one way is better than another. For that one would need to know which activity value would be correct.
Apologies, I have not expressed myself clearly. This is surely because - as indicated in the other comment of mine - we're of vastly different skill levels.
My idea was to construct a new estimator which measures solely the quality of pawn structure. A phrase I learned today. People around me(me included) have played chess casually since kids but rarely read any theory. A number a la "your pawns are 65% perfectly arranged" could be useful to someone not willing to understand deeper. I might be able to narrow this down after some reading.
All in all important is the concept, the implementation less so.
I would like to do that in the future. My biggest problems with estimators like this is only that it's difficult to find a good way to measure the quality of a pawn structure. For example, I'm unsure if it's better to have pawns on c3 and d4, where the c-pawn defends the d-pawn or on c4 and d4, where white has more space.
But I'm thinking about a good way of measuring it and I'll write about it, if I came up with something.
Potential pawn mobility (per Nimzowitsch) including attributing increased activity of pieces resulting from a pawn move to that move, and ability of the pawn to attack a target in one move that it could not reach befoe (plus of course any targets they attack as a result of moving) is how I frame it with students.
I agree, lots of potential there, with such a notion closer to the mobility rule set than, perhaps, sharpness might be. Although there is no reason to not work on many fronts.
But there might be a link to study there. That aspect of difficulty independence with the other difficulty that sharpness in move choice that your LC0-WDL based definition carries. Perhaps the critical point on such "activity" restriction, might be where the 2 meet. Nice article. And examples.
The point was that maybe the pawn move did deploy a potential set of piece (the fast time scale ones activity, into an immediate sizeable differential "intensity". (with chess board rule clock, as the time axis, in my mind). The slope of total activity. I am assuming that you are combining the activities, and that maybe it was intended already in the text. or that it is already obvious to many. This is the first time I read about it from your articles. I use quotes to suggest a word, not to tackle an existing well defined as its proper meaning. (some might use quote to mean proper or term of art, I mean I am not sure and asking reader to use it as analogy).
the piece activity for both sides looks for this game:
I lost the continuity here. Which piece are those plots about. It the curve some king of integration over all pieces on board. Yet I thought you mentioned focusing on a pawn move. just chewing...
If there was not just one piece I missed from reading, but many. Then I am curious about how the many pieces contribute to the 1D vertical axis quantity. My words might not be the best ones. I pick the first that comes and does it for me. you are welcome to use your own, I can learn that way. Would it be ordinate. Y axis. I guess I don,t know the audience enough (or ever).
The graph shows the sum of the activity of all pieces (not including pawns) for each side. I talked about the pawn move since it opened squares and diagonals for White's pieces and hence increased the activity.
is there markup here for quotes. i read by chunk and react that way. it would help.
quote
I decided to keep the formula simple for now but I might change it in the future. As always, it's difficult to say which formula would be more correct, but I certainly think that there is room for improvement. I'm interested to hear some suggestions from you about the formula.
end quote
confirming my salt stuff interpretation. You are liquely not fussing over the math. so to go to the jugular of the ideas. A math. translation I would be tempted would just to put a dependency formulation. perhaps making some comment about the monotonicity, increasing or not, depending on variable. piece activity proportional (assuming you already worded the terms such that any increase in either of them does the same for your definition). to f (term1, term2, term3).
PA = f( PA1, PA2, PA3). but that would distract as at this point you are talking to all our intuitions of the board, and your own, and trying to weed out what is salient. I am making hypothesis of interpretation of things I read, I can be wrong, but I find words so limiting that I have learned to look ahear that way, wrong or not, logic to the rescure later, with help from others, input new data into that soup).
So this alleviates or confirm there is no problem on my end in the future of this. Your self having experssed the same caveat, in fewer words, of course.
I didn't try to invent a more sophisticated formula, because I don't know how the measure the "correctness" of a formula for activity. I guess this would involve looking at a lot of individual position, which sounds interesting but also time consuming.
It would not have to be by inspection. One can extend the space of functions to make a family. It could be about a linear combinations for example. But I was talking in general. It is already something to find that although not a more flexible search space, that function has already 3 significant co factors that explain back certain known things. A positive result that the 3 variables are telling something. They would not even habve to be additionned. you could just consider the 3 values in each case. Adding them makes for a simpler vizualization. Now, it it were not showing much, then inverstigating a higher dimension slice of relation, like following the 3 variables along a game.. migth tell more about the nature of those 3 types of activities.. something like. that.
No need to explain, I was .. conjecturing, or speculating, or just rambling.
If one were to view the total board pressure, from one side onto the board itsef, I would include something about panw. I understand that once off their initial rank in opening or middle game, they may not be the things that we can move often in a row, like we might for a knight. pawn structure having slower dynamics (at their level as pawn placements, 16 of them), but maybe all those considerations need not have initia restriction or exclusion until we have target questions made explicit.
On another hand, if you are exploring with some intuition of your own (nothing wrong with that, we all, small brains that we are not knowing the full complexity at an instant, or ever, having to start somewhere, and capture the gist of things until we are able to apply more logic both ways, (the premise way, and the derived way, as well as the question made explicit way, so that is 3 ways, isn't it?).
An attempts it is. I tend to look forward all the time. It might even stall me. But now I am not alone pursuing such ideas. I like to think.
I also think you are putting salt on the equal, and that the 1 1 1 coefficients are also for the simplicity of the weeding through first ideation. For, we do not have a clarity on what do we want such definition to apply to. How agnostic of evaluation in its premises, (does not mean agnostic of eveluation in its derivation, if well defined).
Not done reading. I do not want to put sticks in the wheel. Just looking ahead.. maybe even stimuate some ideas myself.
I teach along these lines, to consider net difference in activity as a higher-level version of Makogonov's famous rule "Improve the position of your worst-placed piece". Often exchanging an opponent's best piece, or preventing significant improvement of an opponent's piece is the most effective way to increase net difference in activity than to improve one's own piece activity.
(Attacked Squares) + (Attacked Squares in Opponent's Half) +
(Attacked Squares around Opponent's King)
I like these components. This artcle stimulates me to keep working on a more abstract versoin of piece activity, let's say potential activity. But if one were to get a derived version for a full legal position, then I do think these notions would be pressure components to include. not done reading. I hope this will be on lichess, too. I think you are doing exactly the kind of chess theory I thought has been missing.
As these are measure one would apply not in the one play mode games, not as such, but for chess study and theories of chess study (learning). many heads at it, and many games characterisation not necessary bound to the single game decision sequence problem on one indidivual, but putting some structure in the accumluating databases for high level concept to be better defined and shareable without having to be first an expert to talk about the same things. This is not going to make anyone having knowledge advantage in their own improvement track vision of chess, well it might if we the many start digested the accumulated data, for its emerging "logic". Eventually having other means to pull on the mass of data than which first moves got to a specific position, would allow some more theories of learning to be developped, (it might need other types of scientific sources or well definted models of the learner "mechanisms") and then maybe more rational ways of extending existing thoeries of conscious learning, into more conscious theories of subsoncsious learning, The experience does not have to be headless chicken random picking, that might spuriously cluster (if we had no such metrics or components metrics to characterize expeirence). What would unifrom random even mean.
Another idea would be judge pawn structure. I guess N1 would be front line pawns being guarded at all, N2 would be "piece activity" score(as defined in the post - no pawns counted) and a couple of other factors might make up an informative ensemble.
Reminds me of a class in stats - an ensemble is always better IF* every estimator is more accurate than random chance.
* - and look at games from different people, and those people don't have access to the internet but whatever
I didn't count pawns because it seemed to morph into evaluating the structure and not only the piece activity. There are certainly better and more sophisticated ways to calculate piece activity, but the problem is that it's hard to say when one way is better than another. For that one would need to know which activity value would be correct.
Apologies, I have not expressed myself clearly. This is surely because - as indicated in the other comment of mine - we're of vastly different skill levels.
My idea was to construct a new estimator which measures solely the quality of pawn structure. A phrase I learned today. People around me(me included) have played chess casually since kids but rarely read any theory. A number a la "your pawns are 65% perfectly arranged" could be useful to someone not willing to understand deeper. I might be able to narrow this down after some reading.
All in all important is the concept, the implementation less so.
I would like to do that in the future. My biggest problems with estimators like this is only that it's difficult to find a good way to measure the quality of a pawn structure. For example, I'm unsure if it's better to have pawns on c3 and d4, where the c-pawn defends the d-pawn or on c4 and d4, where white has more space.
But I'm thinking about a good way of measuring it and I'll write about it, if I came up with something.
Potential pawn mobility (per Nimzowitsch) including attributing increased activity of pieces resulting from a pawn move to that move, and ability of the pawn to attack a target in one move that it could not reach befoe (plus of course any targets they attack as a result of moving) is how I frame it with students.
<absolute newbie here> Perhaps something about the queen? Motivation:
- it's a valuable/capable piece
- it's utility wildly varies depending on the phase of the game.
I agree, lots of potential there, with such a notion closer to the mobility rule set than, perhaps, sharpness might be. Although there is no reason to not work on many fronts.
But there might be a link to study there. That aspect of difficulty independence with the other difficulty that sharpness in move choice that your LC0-WDL based definition carries. Perhaps the critical point on such "activity" restriction, might be where the 2 meet. Nice article. And examples.
The point was that maybe the pawn move did deploy a potential set of piece (the fast time scale ones activity, into an immediate sizeable differential "intensity". (with chess board rule clock, as the time axis, in my mind). The slope of total activity. I am assuming that you are combining the activities, and that maybe it was intended already in the text. or that it is already obvious to many. This is the first time I read about it from your articles. I use quotes to suggest a word, not to tackle an existing well defined as its proper meaning. (some might use quote to mean proper or term of art, I mean I am not sure and asking reader to use it as analogy).
the piece activity for both sides looks for this game:
I lost the continuity here. Which piece are those plots about. It the curve some king of integration over all pieces on board. Yet I thought you mentioned focusing on a pawn move. just chewing...
If there was not just one piece I missed from reading, but many. Then I am curious about how the many pieces contribute to the 1D vertical axis quantity. My words might not be the best ones. I pick the first that comes and does it for me. you are welcome to use your own, I can learn that way. Would it be ordinate. Y axis. I guess I don,t know the audience enough (or ever).
The graph shows the sum of the activity of all pieces (not including pawns) for each side. I talked about the pawn move since it opened squares and diagonals for White's pieces and hence increased the activity.
is there markup here for quotes. i read by chunk and react that way. it would help.
quote
I decided to keep the formula simple for now but I might change it in the future. As always, it's difficult to say which formula would be more correct, but I certainly think that there is room for improvement. I'm interested to hear some suggestions from you about the formula.
end quote
confirming my salt stuff interpretation. You are liquely not fussing over the math. so to go to the jugular of the ideas. A math. translation I would be tempted would just to put a dependency formulation. perhaps making some comment about the monotonicity, increasing or not, depending on variable. piece activity proportional (assuming you already worded the terms such that any increase in either of them does the same for your definition). to f (term1, term2, term3).
PA = f( PA1, PA2, PA3). but that would distract as at this point you are talking to all our intuitions of the board, and your own, and trying to weed out what is salient. I am making hypothesis of interpretation of things I read, I can be wrong, but I find words so limiting that I have learned to look ahear that way, wrong or not, logic to the rescure later, with help from others, input new data into that soup).
So this alleviates or confirm there is no problem on my end in the future of this. Your self having experssed the same caveat, in fewer words, of course.
I didn't try to invent a more sophisticated formula, because I don't know how the measure the "correctness" of a formula for activity. I guess this would involve looking at a lot of individual position, which sounds interesting but also time consuming.
It would not have to be by inspection. One can extend the space of functions to make a family. It could be about a linear combinations for example. But I was talking in general. It is already something to find that although not a more flexible search space, that function has already 3 significant co factors that explain back certain known things. A positive result that the 3 variables are telling something. They would not even habve to be additionned. you could just consider the 3 values in each case. Adding them makes for a simpler vizualization. Now, it it were not showing much, then inverstigating a higher dimension slice of relation, like following the 3 variables along a game.. migth tell more about the nature of those 3 types of activities.. something like. that.
No need to explain, I was .. conjecturing, or speculating, or just rambling.
(not counting pawns).
If one were to view the total board pressure, from one side onto the board itsef, I would include something about panw. I understand that once off their initial rank in opening or middle game, they may not be the things that we can move often in a row, like we might for a knight. pawn structure having slower dynamics (at their level as pawn placements, 16 of them), but maybe all those considerations need not have initia restriction or exclusion until we have target questions made explicit.
On another hand, if you are exploring with some intuition of your own (nothing wrong with that, we all, small brains that we are not knowing the full complexity at an instant, or ever, having to start somewhere, and capture the gist of things until we are able to apply more logic both ways, (the premise way, and the derived way, as well as the question made explicit way, so that is 3 ways, isn't it?).
An attempts it is. I tend to look forward all the time. It might even stall me. But now I am not alone pursuing such ideas. I like to think.
I also think you are putting salt on the equal, and that the 1 1 1 coefficients are also for the simplicity of the weeding through first ideation. For, we do not have a clarity on what do we want such definition to apply to. How agnostic of evaluation in its premises, (does not mean agnostic of eveluation in its derivation, if well defined).
Not done reading. I do not want to put sticks in the wheel. Just looking ahead.. maybe even stimuate some ideas myself.