TAAI 2013 COMPUTER GAME TOURNAMENTS

Abstract

th , 2013. In this event, fifty computer programs from the Netherlands, France, and Taiwan participated in tournaments for ten different games being Go 9x9, Chinese chess, Connect6, Chinese dark chess, Mahjong, NoGo, MiniShogi, Nonogram, Othello, and Double King Dark Chess. The participants and the final results are listed in Table 1. With much pleasure the organizer invited Prof. Yoshimasa Tsuruka of the University of Tokyo for the keynote speech. Yoshimasa is a developer of the well-known Shogi program, GEKISASHI (激指), which is the four-times World Computer Shogi Champion (WCSC). The title of his talk was Recent Advances in Algorithms for Traditional Board and Table Games. In Table 1, the team from the National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) performed best by winning four gold medals. Each of the other teams was awarded at least one gold medal. This showed that each team has focused on specific games during 2013 and did so obtain good achievements. The champion and the runner-up of Chinese chess tournament were SHIGA and CHIMO, respectively. They had also the same ranks in the 17 th Computer Olympiad and in TAAI 2012. SHIGA won all games except that only one game against CHIMO ended up in a draw in this tournament. SHIGA was designed to support the multiprocessor architecture, and its search depth reached 20 plies while using a 4.5GHz 12-core computer. CHIMO used an opening book compiled from 85,000 game records that was then enhanced by the JL-ABS algorithm. Its evaluation function was improved and was tuned better. Both programs were estimated to be near 8-dan. SHARK as a newcomer won the bronze medal. Chinese dark chess is popular in China and Taiwan. It uses the same board and pieces as Chinese chess, but the pieces can be either revealed or unrevealed (Chen et al., 2010). In 2013, nine programs from France and Taiwan participated. The competitions were played automatically on the game-playing platform designed by Jr-Chang Chen. The platform was also used in the 17 th Computer Olympiad. YAHARI, which landed at the third place in the 17 th Computer Olympiad, became the champion; and SGTDARK was the runner-up. Both programs are based on alpha-beta search (ABS) and used endgame databases constructed by retrograde analysis. The third place was for DARKKNIGHT, which also won the bronze medal in TAAI 2012. DARKKNIGHT was based on Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) and utilized the concept of chance nodes to deal with flipping unrevealed pieces. The playing strength of each program improved significantly, and the programs based on ABS performed slightly better than those based on MCTS.