Chess - Programming - Static Exchange Evaluation (SEE)

Determine if a capture gains or loses material once all the moves in the sequence has been played out.

Evaluating a capture without actually playing out the moves.

• It is mainly used for sorting quiescent (and ordinary) moves which produces far better results than the MVV/LVA scheme.

Consider a capture move.

• Say Queen takes Pawn.
• This returns a +100 score.
• All good if the Pawn was undefended.

But what if that Pawn was defended.

• Then the Queen could be taken.
• This results in a -800 score.

Find all attackers

• Let them capture alternately on the square starting with the lowest valued piece,.
• Keep track of what pieces capture and finally find the best possible results of the capture sequence.

Consider direct attacks at first.

• If there are two rooks on the same file for example only the first rook is directly attacking the square, the second is indirectly attacking it and this will be handled later.

Static Exchange Evaluation (SEE)