A Cognitive Science Approach to Shogi Playing Processes
Ito, T., Matsubara, H. and Grimbergen, R. (2000)
Information Processing Society of Japan Report 2000-GI-4, pages 29--35
Abstract
There have been a number of cognitive studies in chess and Go, but there has been no attempt
at analyzing the cognitive behavior of shogi players. Shogi has a number of features that are
different from chess, so it is not necessarily the case that cognitive science results for chess carry
over to shogi. Therefore, we have started our cognitive study into shogi by repeating three cognitive
experiments performed in chess in the 60s. In this paper we present the results of these three memory
tasks. The first memory task is memorizing a set of shogi positions without any time limit. The
second memory task is memorizing shogi positions with a time limit of 3 seconds. The third memory
task is memorizing random shogi positions. Our experiments have been performed on a beginner, a
club player and an expert player. Also, the eye movements of the subjects during all experiments
were tracked with an eye camera. Despite the differences between chess and shogi in both rules of
the game and perception of the board and pieces, we found no significant differences between the
results of our experiments and the earlier results for chess.