  This article describes an application of three well-known statistical methods
in the field of game-tree search: using a large number of classified Othello
positions, feature weights for evaluation functions with a
game-phase-independent meaning are estimated by means of logistic regression,
Fisher's linear discriminant, and the quadratic discriminant function for
normally distributed features. Thereafter, the playing strengths are compared
by means of tournaments between the resulting versions of a world-class Othello
program. In this application, logistic regression - which is used here for the
first time in the context of game playing - leads to better results than the
other approaches.
