In my recent post on move ordering, I identified a potential area of improvement to the criteria for deciding if a capture is “good” or “bad.” As I wrote in that post, a capture is good if:

1. It is a promotion (technically even non-capturing promotions are included)
2. The value of the captured piece is greater than the value of the capturing piece
3. The Static Exchange Evaluator (SEE) score is non-negative.

The issue is with knights and bishops. They are roughly the same value (which one is more valuable really depends on the position), but in Prophet the bishop has a slightly higher value. A knight has a material value equal to 3 pawns, but a bishop has 3.2 pawns. The consequence of that is that a simple Bishop x Knight capture would be categorized as “bad” and not tried until all non-captures have been tried.

I don’t have the link handy but I read an older post on talkchess.com where Tord Romstad, the author of Glaurang (pre-cursor to Stockfish), mentioned that he used different piece values for the purposes of move ordering than he did in the evaluation. He said he used 1, 3, 3, 5 and 10. That means Bishop x Knight captures, as well as Knight x Bishop captures would both be categorized as “good.” Also, by giving the queen a value of 10, it means that giving two rooks for a queen would be considered equal by the SEE, where giving a queen + pawn for two rooks would have a negative score.

Sure enough, that simple change seems to be worth about 6 ELO.