Gambits
It’s pretty interesting and fun to see how an engine’s personality develops as you continue to tinker and improve its evaluation. One specific area where personality can be observed is in the opening an engine chooses.
In the earlier versions of Blunder, they played pretty standard openings for white and black. Usually with white my engine would play into something like an Italian game, and with black usually a four knights defense.
Around version 7.3.0, because of tweaks I made to the evaluation, now Blunder instead liked playing the Sicilian Defense for black, which is of course still a very standard opening and perhaps the most popular reponse for Black to the King’s Pawn opening. Still it’s interesting to see this shift in Blunder’s playing style to being more agressive and immediately trying to take more control of the center.
Now, in a further development with the most recent version release, Blunder consistently decides to play the Smith-Morra gambit against the Sicilian Defense! As far as I can tell from my research, while the gambit isn’t considered the best plan for white, it’s regarded as a pretty formidable wepon, at least at lower levels.
Regardless however, it’s still quite fun and interesting to see Blunder starting to understand material compenstation and more human concepts like creating an attacking initative, controlling the center, and winning in piece development.