Using Convolution and Deep Learning in Gomoku Game Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Gomoku is an ancient board game. The traditional approach to solving the Gomoku game is to apply tree search on a Gomoku game tree. Although the rules of Gomoku are straightforward, the game tree complexity is enormous. Unlike many other board games such as chess and Shogun, the Gomoku board state is more intuitive. That is to say, analyzing the visual patterns on a Gomoku game board is fundamental to play this game. In this paper, we designed a deep convolutional neural network model to help the machine learn from the training data (collected from human players). Based on this original neural network model, we made some changes and get two variant neural networks. We compared the performance of the original neural network with its variants in our experiments. Our original neural network model got 69% accuracy on the training data and 38% accuracy on the testing data. Because the decision made by the neural network is intuitive, we also designed a hard-coded convolution-based Gomoku evaluation function to assist the neural network in making decisions. This hybrid Gomoku artificial intelligence (AI) further improved the performance of a pure neural network-based Gomoku AI.