alt Hacker NewsTo your last point, the centipawns thing doesn't make a whole lot of sense from an interpretation perspective because it is so shallow. WDL can give you much more insight into how tame or chaotic things are. A 1 pawn evaluated advantage with a 95% chance to win is wildly different from a similar evaluation and a 50% chance to win. The first position likely has an obvious tactic that leads to a win, the latter may require perfect play for 15 moves that only a computer can calculate.
Also, from a computer perspective, a >= 1 pawn is usually sufficient for a computer to win 100% of the time so it's not really interesting and says very little about whether a person could win 100% of the time.
Yep, exactly. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out better ways for interpreting the evaluations of engines for https://www.schachzeit.com/en/openings/barnes-opening-with-d... and I ended up liking WDL much better than centipawns. A blunder defined in terms of decreasing your chance of winning by such and such percentage is, to me, a much better definition than a blunder losing such and such material. What does that mean? It makes sense to me now, but it took a long while.
Relatedly, there is an interesting thing that lc0 has been doing as well, where it takes the contempt concept even further, and can beat you with queens odd. https://lczero.org/blog/2024/12/the-leela-piece-odds-challen... It assumes it is better than you and that it shouldn't just give up because you might be up a knight, rook or even queen.