Learning a Go Heuristic with TILDE

  • Authors:
  • Jan Ramon;Tom Francis;Hendrik Blockeel

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • CG '00 Revised Papers from the Second International Conference on Computers and Games
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

In Go, an important factor that hinders search is the large branching factor, even in local problems. Human players are strong at recognizing frequently occurring shapes and vital points. This allows them to select the most promising moves and to prune the search tree. In this paper we argue that many of these shapes can be represented as relational concepts. We present an application of the relational learner TILDE in which we learn a heuristic that gives values to candidate-moves in tsume-go (life and death) problems. Such a heuristic can be used to limit the number of evaluated moves. Even if all moves are evaluated, alpha-beta search can be sped up considerably when the candidate-moves are approximately ordered from good to bad.We validate our approach with experiments and analysis.