Planning to Guide Opening and Middle Game Play in Shogi
Grimbergen, R. and Matsubara, H. (2000)
Proceedings of the 42nd Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence Workshop, pp. 19--24
Abstract
In shogi the use of an opening database is not as effective as for example
in chess. Tests with a large
opening database show that on average only move suggestions for the first
nine moves can be expected. Therefore, planning the development
of pieces in the opening must be guided in a different way to avoid that
the program will be at a disadvantage early in the game. In this paper we
propose two methods
for partially matching the game position with positions in the database.
The first partial matching method is half matching, in which only
the pieces of the player to move are matched to the positions in the
database. The second type of matching is quarter matching, where the
pieces of the player to move in two 5x5 sections of the board are matched
to positions in the database. We show that with these matching methods,
we can extend the phase of the game in which the opening database is
effective.
We will also show that these partial matching methods improve the
overall level of play of a shogi program. The test results also
suggest that quarter matching combined with half matching is better than
only using half matching.