Abstract
Allis proposed dependency-based search (DBS) to solve Go-Moku, a kind of five-in-a-row game. DBS is critical for threat space search (TSS) when there are many independent or nearly independent TSS areas. Similarly, DBS is also important for the game Connect6, a kind of six-in-a-row game with two pieces per move. Unfortunately, the rule that two pieces are played per move in Connect6 makes DBS extremely difficult to apply to Connect6 programs. This paper is the first attempt to apply DBS to Connect6 programs. The targeted program is NCTU6, which won Connect6 tournaments in the Computer Olympiad twice and defeated many professional players in Man-Machine Connect6 championships. The experimental results show that DBS yields a speedup factor of 4.12 on average, and up to 50 for some hard positions.
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- 1.
Practically, stones are placed on empty intersections of Renju or Go boards. In this paper, when we say squares, we mean intersections.
- 2.
In actual implementation for the zone \( Z^{*} \left( {M_{a} } \right) \), all lines centered on \( P(M_{a}^{A} ) \) are not longer than 6 in all directions. Moreover, the lines are shortened when encountering opponent pieces. The zone is denoted by \( Z^{*} \), since these lines form a star-like shape from the attacking pieces.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the National Science Council of the Republic of China (Taiwan) for financial support of this research under contract numbers NSC 97-2221-E-009-126-MY3, NSC 99-2221-E-009-102-MY3 and NSC 99-2221-E-009-104-MY3.
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Wu, IC., Kang, HH., Lin, HH., Lin, PH., Wei, TH., Chang, CM. (2014). Dependency-Based Search for Connect6. In: van den Herik, H., Iida, H., Plaat, A. (eds) Computers and Games. CG 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8427. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09165-5_1
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