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Plausible Move Generation Using Move Merit Analysis with Cut-Off Thresholds in Shogi

  • Reijer Grimbergen
Conference paper
First Online:
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 2063)

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 new method for plausible move generation in shogi. During move generation, Move Merit Analysis (MMA) gives a value to each move based on the plausible move generator(s) that generated the move. These values can be used for different cut-off schemes. We investigate the following alternatives: 1) Keep all moves with a positive MMA value; 2) Order the moves according to their MMA value and use cut-off thresholds to keep the best N moves. PMG with MMA and cut-off thresholds can save between 46% and 68% of the total number of legal moves with an accuracy between 99% and 93%. Tests show that all versions of shogi programs using PMG with MMA outperform an equivalent shogi program using full-width search. It is also shown that MMA is vital for our approach. Plausible move generation with MMA performs much better than plausible move generation without MMA. Cut-off thresholds improve the performance for N = 20 or N = 30.

Keywords

Plausible move generation move merit analysis cut-off thresholds shogi 
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2001

Authors and Affiliations

  • Reijer Grimbergen
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of Information ScienceSaga UniversitySaga-shi, Saga-kenJapan

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