Author: Tord Romstad
Date: 03:13:35 11/05/01
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My favorite board game to *play* is go. However, programming go is simply too difficult for me, at least until I become a much stronger player. The most interesting game to program, right now, is IMHO shogi. Chess programming is beginning to get boring; modern computers are so fast that a bug-free nullmove-enhanced alpha beta search coupled with a very rudimentary eval is sufficient for making a very strong program. While chess is too easy and go is too hard to program, shogi is just right (IMHO, of course). Compared to chess programming, I see two major differences which make shogi more interesting: 1. Material balance is much less important. This means that it is considerably more difficult to design an accurate evaluation function. In order to play well, the program needs very sophisticated techniques for evaluating king safety and the initiative. 2. The branching factor is much higher. As a consequence, brute force search is still too slow to be effective. Knowledge-based selective pruning is necessary to search deeply. The horizon effect is still a very serious problem in computer shogi. Tord
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