Conditional combinatorial games and their application to analyzing capturing races in Go

Authors:
Martin Müller
Affiliations:
Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada T6G 2E8
Venue:
Information Sciences—Informatics and Computer Science: An International Journal - Special issue: Heuristic search and computer game playing III
Year:
2003

Citing 2
Cited 1

Partial order bounding: a new approach to evaluation in game tree search

Artificial Intelligence - Special issue on heuristic search in artificial intelligence
Decomposition Search: A Combinatorial Games Approach to Game Tree Search, with Applications to Solving Go Endgames

IJCAI '99 Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Static analysis based on formal models and incremental computation in Go programming

Theoretical Computer Science - Advances in computer games

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.09

Visualization

Abstract

Conditional combinatorial games (CCG) are a new tool developed for describing loosely coupled games. The definition of CCG is based on the one for classical independent combinatorial games. However, play in a CCG depends on its global context: certain moves are legal only if a nonlocal context condition is currently true. Compared with independent combinatorial games, CCG only allow some weaker forms of pruning. The first part of this paper starts to develop a theory of CCG and gives some examples.In the second part, CCG are shown to be useful for studying capturing races called semeai in the game of Go. We introduce a general framework for analyzing semeai, which is based on CCG and on an extension called liberty count games. We show how this framework encompasses and extends our earlier work on solving semeai [M. Müller, Race to capture: Analyzing semeai in Go, in: Game Programming Workshop in Japan '99, IPSJ Symposium Series, vol. 99(14), 1999, p. 61].