Plausible Move Generation Using Move Merit Analysis in Shogi

Grimbergen, R. and Matsubara, H. (2000)

Information Processing Society of Japan Report 2000-GI-3, pp. 9--16

Abstract

In games where the number of legal moves is too high, it is not possible to do full-width search to a depth sufficient for good play. Plausible move generation (PMG) is an important search alternative in such domains. In this paper we propose a method for plausible move generation in shogi. During move generation, Move Merit Analysis (MMA) assigns a value to each move based on the plausible move generator(s) that generated the move. PMG with MMA on average reduces the number of moves to 54% of the total number of legal moves with 99% accuracy. Tests show that PMG with MMA outperforms full-width search in shogi.