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Does anyone know of an engine that gives "sub-scores" (e.g., for material, king safety, space, activity) in addition to its total evaluation? Lots of people have wished over the years that engines could help players understand why their moves are bad, and although having access to sub-scores wouldn't be a total solution, it might help. Even if the engine doesn't output these scores directly, if they're part of the evaluation--and if the engine is open-source--a sufficiently interested user might be able to make use of them.

Of course, I'm assuming that something like a "sub-score" is part of some modern engine's evaluation function. They could all be too advanced and/or non-linear for that now.

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    There's a tool that showed all the sub-scores for Stockfish that I linked on another answer, but I just checked and the link died. I wonder if I can find it elsewhere.
    – D M
    Mar 22, 2020 at 4:39
  • That would be awesome! Thanks for checking.
    – DATACOMMANDER
    Mar 22, 2020 at 4:42
  • This is not exactly what you are looking for, but you might be interested in this very good site as it might meet your underlying goal of having things explained: decodechess.com . You can open a free account, and try it out, and if you use it a lot, sign up for a premium membership.
    – PhishMaster
    Mar 22, 2020 at 13:26

2 Answers 2

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What about?

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The eval command will do what you want. However, it's not useful for chess learning. They are just static evaluations. What you're after is more like extracting features from the analysis. Stockfish doesn't have it.

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  • Interesting. By the way, if you want to set a position just use the command "position fen fen_code_for_position"
    – emdio
    Mar 22, 2020 at 13:17
  • Thanks for this. I'm wondering if this could have some use in a statistical analysis of a player's moves. Say you compare the subject player's move in a given position with Stockfish's move and find that the player's move makes his king safer than his opponent's, but gives his opponent a better "passer" score. Over a large number of moves, maybe you could determine that the player over-values some things and under-values other things?
    – DATACOMMANDER
    Mar 23, 2020 at 4:56
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If you go to this page and enter a position, you can click the links on the left (or the "table" and "graph" tabs on the top) to see the sub-scores for Stockfish.

Note that this is a static evaluation that does not look ahead. If you want to use it, you should look at the line Stockfish gives you, and enter the position at the end of that line.

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  • Thanks, this is helpful. I'll see if I can figure out how to pull this information from Stockfish programmatically.
    – DATACOMMANDER
    Mar 22, 2020 at 5:03

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