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Is this in comparison to some other evaluation function which is perfect? I agree that all positions should have a certainty of win, draw, or lose with perfect play, but no engine is close to that level of evaluation function.

I do suspect that this pathological behavior could be trained out with additional fine tuning, but likely not without slightly diminishing the model's overall ability.

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It comes down to: What is the evaluation for? For a human using an engine to analyze, it is about getting to more win-likely positions. And for an engine, it really is the same; plus to guide the search. Having a perfect trinary win/draw/loss would certainly be the _truth_ about a position in some objective way, but it would almost certainly not be the optimal way to win chess games against a set opponent. 1. e4 and 1. h3 are almost certainly both draws with perfect play from both sides, but the former is much more likely to net a win, especially for a human using the engine.

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