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Subject: Re: Level of complexity

Author: Jaime Benito de Valle Ruiz

Date: 03:57:05 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.
>
>Thanks,
>Rick

I'm maybe wrong, but I learnt to play Xiangqi in China, and they call it
"Chinese chess", or at least, my friends. "Go" is the Japanese name for the
originally Chinese "Weiqi", although the rules are slightly different (I only
know the Japanese ones, by the way).
I don't know much about the other games, except for maybe the rules, because I
haven't played them.
I'm not good (at all) enough at Xianqi to be able to tell whether is more
complex than chess, but I'd dare to say it is not -although, I could be
mistaken, of course.

Regarding Go (I'm not good neither), from what I know, it's extremely hard to
make a program capable of competing with great masters, because the evaluation
must take into account complex patterns in an oversized 19x19 board, and a big
problem is that the branching factor is very high, not only because there are
lots of available moves, but because quite often during the game there can
easily be over 20 good moves (or much more at the beginning) to choose among,
whereas in Chess or Xianqi there are a few sensible moves to be considered at
each ply. Another problem is that early choices for stone placement don't seem
to have any definite effect until much later on during the game, and captures
are not as important as in chess in order to win, so most cutoffs will only
happen at late stages of the game (depth 100?); just imagine the size of the
hash needed to handle transpositions here! I imagine that a different approach
must be followed here.

Just my thoughts, because I'm much worse at these two than at chess.
Regards,

  Jaime



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