PART 2 • Spotting mistakes: your personal chess coach
You can tweak your chess coach's settings in Chess King by
clicking the yellow Menu button in the ribbon and selecting
settings. You'll see a box in the “Settings” dialogue which
gives you two settings which you can change:
• Both values in this dialogue determine when and how often the chess
coach will appear to warn you of a blunder.
• Houdini 4 runs constantly when you play games in Chess King,
constantly evaluating the current position and future possibilities.
Houdini's evaluations are at the heart of the chess coach function (and,
by the way, we'll take a closer look at how computers play chess later
in this book).
• The “threshold” value is a number measured in 1/100ths of a pawn
(sometimes called a “centipawn” by computer chess fans). Setting this
for “100” (as you see in the illustration) means that the coach won't
appear unless your move gives away a full pawn (or more) in Houdini
4's evaluation. Thus a bad move which gives up 75 centipawns (three
quarters of a pawn in Houdini's evaluation) won't qualify as a “blunder”
(even though it's a relatively serious error to an intermediate player),
and the chess coach pop-up won't appear.
• The lower you set the Threshold value, the more often you'll see the
coach appear. Conversely, the higher you set the value, the less often
you'll see the pop-up. For example, setting the Threshold to a value of
300 means that the coach won't pop up unless you give away a minor
piece (Bishop or Knight) or more. But if you set the Threshold very low
(let's say to a value of 10), you'll see the coach pop up on nearly every
move unless you're a very strong player.
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