The importance of a piece difference feature to Blondie24

In recent years, significant research attention has been paid to evolving self-learning checkers players. Fogel´s Blondie24 has been very successful in this field and has inspired other researchers to further develop this area. In this paper we address the question of whether piece difference is an important factor in the Blondie24 architecture. Although this issue has been addressed before, this work provides a different experimental setup to previous work, but arrives at the same conclusion. Our experiments show that piece difference has a significant effect on learning abilities.