[paulddraper]

Surprised it didn’t mention until the very end, but since chess is deterministic, there is no objective probability.

Every position is objectively plus infinity, minus infinity, or zero.

The “advantage” is an engine-specific notion that helps prune search paths.

Some chess engines don’t even evaluate an advantage.

[kuboble]

There are also objective measures for more fine position evaluation.

For winning/drawn positions: "What is the smallest program that can guarantee your side to win/draw" probably adding some time constraint.

[im3w1l]

I think program size is probably not a good measure since any heuristic you can put in could be discovered at runtime with a metaheuristic that searches for good heuristics. Time and memory make more sense.

[paulddraper]

Measuring the size of a model that produces a win?

Theoretically valid, but that's not going to be a very useful/diable.

[jmount]

That is a neat variation.

[TZubiri]

Not only it is mentioned, but it's mentioned that it was mentioned as early as 1950, by none other than Claude Shannon:

>""under perfect play all chess games be a the same single one outcome of the following (we just currently don’t know which one, “A” playing the white pieces): Mr. A says, “I resign” or Mr. B says, “I resign” or Mr. A says, “I offer a draw,” and Mr. B replies, “I accept"

[janalsncm]

Yeah it’s confusing because there are really three “evaluations” you could have for a position

1) god-mode 1/0/-1 which you could argue is the “true” position 2) engine centipawns which help the search algorithm 3) human evaluation which would distinguish between two positions in terms of a subjective difficulty

For example, two positions might be 0.0 on the eval bar but one position is an obvious draw and in the other position one player has to walk a tightrope of precise moves to draw. Just because that’s obvious to a computer doesn’t mean a human can easily draw the second position.

[monktastic1]

Yes, this is a huge omission, because it means that as engines improve, the stated advantage becomes increasingly meaningless to humans (which is the opposite of what we may intuitively expect).

What I really want to know as a player is how easy it will be for me to win from this position against someone of my opponent's strength, which is admittedly a very hard thing to define, let alone compute.

[TurdF3rguson]

How likely you mean. It's the same effort to win a game as to lose a game.