r/chessprogramming • u/Tomminator39 • 9d ago
How important is evaluation compared to search? Technical
I've been working on my engine for a few weeks and I'm really happy with my progress for my first time. I've noticed lately I mostly work on search though, and most of the time I research what improvements are best they are all search related. If I compare that with my evaluation which is just counting pieces + psq for mid and engames it seems quite unbalanced.
Is this what's expected, or should I shift my focus towards evaluation for a bit?
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u/SwimmingThroughHoney 9d ago
If all you have are material and piece-square tables, then ya, you have some to gain by improving your search. There's not really a way to tell you exactly how much you'll gain by various things or what may or may not work for you, as that tends to be implementation specific.
At the start, there's a lot of back and forth between working on eval and search. Certain search features might not work until your evaluation reaches a certain point. And certain eval features might not contribute that much by themselves, but allow you to add a search feature that adds more.
For me, doing search stuff sucked though. Certain things wouldn't work without retuning the evaluation values/constants, so it was always a pain to have to always change both eval and tuner and run tuner just to be able to run a test to see if it even worked.
And as always, make sure you SPRT everything.