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A Survey of Tsume-Shogi Programs Using Variable-Depth Search

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Computers and Games (CG 1998)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1558))

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Abstract

Recently, a number of programs have been developed that successfully apply variable-depth search to find solutions for mating problems in Japanese chess, called tsume shogi. Publications on this research domain have been written mainly in Japanese. To present the findings of this research to a wider audience, we compare six different tsume programs. To find the solutions of difficult tsume-shogi problems with solution sequences longer than 20 plies, we will see that variable-depth search and hashing to deal with a combination of transposition, domination and simulation leads to strong tsume-shogi programs that outperform human experts, both in speed and in the number of problems for which the solution can be found. The best program has been able to solve Microcosmos, a tsume-shogi problem with a solution sequence of 1525 plies.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Electrotechnical Laboratory, 1-1-4 Umezono, Tsukuba-shi, Ibaraki-ken, Japan, 305-8568

    Reijer Grimbergen

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  1. Reijer Grimbergen
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Maastricht, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    H. Jaap van den Herik

  2. Department of Computer Science, Shizuoka University, Hamamatsu, Japan

    Hiroyuki Iida

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© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Grimbergen, R. (1999). A Survey of Tsume-Shogi Programs Using Variable-Depth Search. In: van den Herik, H.J., Iida, H. (eds) Computers and Games. CG 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1558. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48957-6_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48957-6_20

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-65766-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48957-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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