Winboard Forum

Good day all.

I am writing Moonfish engine for Sho Shogi (direct predecessor of modern Shogi) and I have a question:

Does anyone have Piece-Square Tables for Shogi?

It would help me a lot to build my engine.

I guess the PST for regular Shogi would not be very helpful for Sho Shogi; the drops make it an entirely different game. Even the piece values will be very different. (E.g. in Crazyhouse a Queen is worth only about 2 minors, rather than 3.)

In regular Shogi proximity of the generals to the King is much more important than their absolute location on the board. But PST can only give you the latter. I would think that a PST that encourages centralization of all pieces except King, Elephant, Lance and Rook in the middle game would already be a big step in the right direction. The Lance should probably be discouraged for moving forwards; it has not much to gain from it.

Promotion is of course an issue; Pawns and Knights at the edge of the promotion zone should already be considered close in value to a Gold.

You could test your engine against HaChu, which does support Sho Shogi (although it is mainly tuned for Chu Shogi).