PART 2 • Analyzing your games with houdini
To start Houdini on the task of analyzing the position currently
on the board, click the “Start now” button. After a few
moments the engine panel at the bottom of the screen will
spring to life and you'll see Houdini hard at work analyzing the
position at hand:
• (By the way, I said that there were a couple of ways to launch Houdini's
analysis. The second way is to click the blue button in the upper lefthand corner of the engine panel above. This button can be used to
quickly turn Houdini on and off.)
• You can see in the illustration above that Houdini is hard at work
analyzing the current board position. Houdini will provide the best
variation from the current board position (assuming best pay for both
sides, meaning that each player makes the strongest possible move).
Symbols to the far left of the variation show graphically who would be
ahead assuming that the moves of the variation displayed are played.
(You can find a list of those symbols and what they mean by hitting
CTRL-A while viewing a game, as we learned in Chapter 12; you can
mouse over the symbols in that display to see what each symbol
means.) To the right of the symbol is a numeric evaluation of the
position, gauged down to 1/100th of a pawn. A positive number means
that White is better, while a negative value indicates that Black is better.
In the illustration above, White is very slightly ahead, by 19/100ths of a
pawn. If the value was instead given as +1.00, it would mean that White
was a full pawn ahead.
• Here are some values to help you understand the numbers: 0.0 is an
even game.0.30 is equivalent to about a tempo (or move), which is
about the smallest measurable (to a human) quantity in a computer's
evaluation. 1.00 is the value of a pawn. 3.00 is the value of a minor
piece. 5.00 is the value of a Rook. 9.00 is the value of a Queen. 299.99
is a value signifying that the player is clearly winning; this is typically
seen when one side has a forced mate or is materially so far ahead that
exact numbers are for all intents and purposes meaningless.
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