Game solving is the process of finding the theoretical outcome for a game, assuming that all player choices are optimal. This paper focuses on a technique that can reduce the heuristic search space significantly for 7x7 Killall-Go. In Go and Killall-Go, live patterns are stones that are protected from opponent capture. Mutual life, also referred to as seki, is when both players’ stones achieve life by sharing liberties with their opponent. Whichever player attempts to capture the opponent first will leave their own stones vulnerable. Therefore, it is critical to recognize seki patterns to avoid putting oneself in jeopardy. Recognizing seki can reduce the search depth significantly. In this paper, we enumerate all seki patterns up to a predetermined area size, then store these patterns into a seki table. This allows us to recognize seki during search, which significantly improves solving efficiency for the game of Killall-Go. Experiments show that a position that could not be solved within a day can be solved in 482 s with the addition of a seki table. For general positions, a 10% to 20% improvement in wall clock time and node count is observed.

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Solving 7x7 Killall-Go with Seki Database

  • Yun-Jui Tsai,
  • Ting Han Wei,
  • Chi-Huang Lin,
  • Chung-Chin Shih,
  • Hung Guei,
  • I-Chen Wu,
  • Ti-Rong Wu

摘要

Game solving is the process of finding the theoretical outcome for a game, assuming that all player choices are optimal. This paper focuses on a technique that can reduce the heuristic search space significantly for 7x7 Killall-Go. In Go and Killall-Go, live patterns are stones that are protected from opponent capture. Mutual life, also referred to as seki, is when both players’ stones achieve life by sharing liberties with their opponent. Whichever player attempts to capture the opponent first will leave their own stones vulnerable. Therefore, it is critical to recognize seki patterns to avoid putting oneself in jeopardy. Recognizing seki can reduce the search depth significantly. In this paper, we enumerate all seki patterns up to a predetermined area size, then store these patterns into a seki table. This allows us to recognize seki during search, which significantly improves solving efficiency for the game of Killall-Go. Experiments show that a position that could not be solved within a day can be solved in 482 s with the addition of a seki table. For general positions, a 10% to 20% improvement in wall clock time and node count is observed.