It's really just a easy way to keep track of material where each piece is compared to an approximate number of pawns.
The actual value of the pieces is also dependent on the position in question, so the numbers you put up are only considered an average.
The chess gods said so!
Well, those are the average values of the pieces in a game. They ofcourse fluctuate depending on the position. A pawn one square away from queening is worth more then any other piece on the board, right?
Also I think that many do assign 3.25 points for a bishop compared to 3 points average value of a knight.
Actually, this is simply the most accepted norm.
There were many different attempts, which gave the pieces different value.
For a good read, see the Wikipedia article: Chess piece relative value . It documents countless point systems and their history.
Thanks for the Wikipedia article. Don't know why I didn't think to look there. To all who commented on the relative value and the changing value, thank you, too. This helps. However, I'm not one to accept the word from on high or from "experts." I think all these valuation systems are bizarre, but it will take a fair amount of serious thought before I can adequately express why. Bottom line, I don't think odd numbers makes sense as a schema in chess.
Sometimes it's good to doubt "experts" other times it's interesting to note that they were simply people who liked to think critically about chess, the same as you're doing here. Chess pieces didn't have points assigned to them, people just played. Over many years some of these strong players / critical thinkers formed a relative value for each piece, and after many more years it was proven to be relatively correct (everyone knows each position is unique and these are just guidelines). Now with computers fine tuning evaluations means adjusting them a small amount and having them play 50,000 super fast games and measuring the results. The 1,3,3,5,9 is still the most common and useful in games, sure they might be off some tenths of a unit here or there, but I don't think it's worth ignoring.
Now with computers fine tuning evaluations means adjusting them a small amount and having them play 50,000 super fast games and measuring the results.
Computer chess doesn't actually evaluate points. I have a background in programming, and it's my understanding that past the opening a computer doesn't use algorithms but, rather, a database of relative positions and then matches patterns. If I am correct about that, then the point system is, as I suspect, either skewed, not granular enough, or of relatively little value as the middle game progresses.
Why are the pieces assigned these points: Q=9, R=5, B=3, N=3, and p=1?
I find this misleading, and I'd love to know who invented this system and why. I think maybe if I understood the why the system would be more useful to me.
The board itself appears to be a hexadecimal system, 8x8, with 16 units per player. The minimum number of pieces that can ever be on the board during a game is 2. It's a game with a binary outcome: one winner or no winners.
Even so, the points are all odd numbers.
Worse yet, the N simply doesn't seem to me to be worth quite as much as a Bishop, even though neither one alone can put a King in checkmate. Two Bishops, though, can, while two knights can't.