Author: Tord Romstad
Date: 02:36:20 01/08/04
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On January 07, 2004 at 20:40:49, Rick Rice wrote: >How would you rate the level of complexity for the following games, in the >programming sense? > >Shogi >Go >Chinese Chess >Orthodox Chess >Gothic Chess >Fisher Random Chess >Hexagonal Chess >Xiangki > >Feel free to add any of your own. Being one of the less than 1% readers who knows the rules of all games, I'll try to answer. :-) First of all, of course, it depends on your definition of "level of complexity". If your goal is to make the strongest engine in the world for a specific game, orthodox chess is almost certainly by far the hardest, while Gothic chess and hexagonal chess are the easiest. This has nothing to do with the games in themselves, the reason is simply that much less effort have been made on making strong engines in all the other games than in orthodox chess. A more interesting question is how the different games compare regarding the difficulty of creating a challenging opponent for human players. In this sense Go is incomparably much more difficult than all the other games, with shogi as a distant number two. The remaining games should be roughly comparable. Gothic chess and hexagonal chess are perhaps somewhat more complicated than orthodox chess, FRC and xiangqi (note that the correct spelling is "xiangqi", not "xiangki"), but the differences between those games are not big. Unlike what most people think, the big branching factor in go and shogi is not the most important reason why it is more difficult to write strong computer programs for these games. The real problem is that it is very difficult to write good evaluation functions. In orthodox chess, FRC, xiangqi, Gothic chess and hexagonal chess, a material evaluation with some simple positional stuff added is enough to create a reasonably strong engine (at least strong enough to beat the average human player). In Go, there is no equivalent of material, and also no other similarly dominant component of the evaluation function. Shogi occupies a middle position: It is possible to count and evaluate the material balance, but material has much less importance than in chess. For instance, the best human players easily beat the strongest computers with a rook handicap. Tord
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