The answer is that Magnus would win. Eight pawns may be almost as many points as a queen, but they won’t have much luck fighting her from their star

What's a Pawn Worth? - by Nate Solon - Zwischenzug

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2023-03-19 20:00:06

The answer is that Magnus would win. Eight pawns may be almost as many points as a queen, but they won’t have much luck fighting her from their starting squares. White’s lack of pawns is almost a bonus here, because along with the queen it plays into the plan of quickly mobilizing the pieces and mopping up Black’s forces. AlphaZero is much stronger than any human, even Magnus, but it still needs something to work with. In this position if White plays decently Black will never have a chance. The position is so winning for White that it doesn’t take a Magnus Carlsen to beat AlphaZero.

I had some preparation for this particular question based on a class I attended a long, long time ago. I was a little kid in Michigan and the instructor was Ben Finegold, now of internet fame. He set up a position on the demo board with queen vs. eight pawns (the same as the Magnus vs. AlphaZero question, but with no other pieces on the board besides kings) and asked who would win. I figured it would be the queen, but most of the other kids went with the pawns, so I wasn’t feeling too confident. Even less so when Ben invited me up to play the queen with him taking the pawns. I guess he sensed my nervousness because he muttered under his breath, “Don’t worry, you’re going to win.” And sure enough I won without too much trouble. It’s actually a very easy position to win: the queen just swoops around and picks up Black’s pawns. As with Carlsen vs. AlphaZero, the queen is just too powerful.

I was curious how many pawns you have to add before Black is favored. The answer, it turns out, is 12. So have we been wrong all along? Is the queen really worth 12 points? Not really. The issue isn’t that nine is the wrong number of pawns, it’s that expressing the queen’s value in terms of pawns just doesn’t make sense. There’s no number of pawns you can stack up in a trenchcoat to make a queen. Asking how many pawns a queen is worth is like asking how many avocados it takes to make an airplane.

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