N. Sanechika, M. Tajima, and M. Müller.
ETL Complex Games Lab
Tsukuba, Japan
{sanetika,tazima,mueller}@etl.go.jp
Go is often called a game of intuition, especially the opening stage. In this paper we try to clarify what is actually going on behind the human way of abstract thinking in the opening stage, when moves are played mainly based on knowledge and intuition rather than lookahead. The approach is to extract knowledge from a Fuseki problem collection. First we selected four key abstract strategic themes: moyo,weak stone(group),thickness(wall) and ooba(big place), and gave them observable definitions. By classifying the problems in the collection, about 30 typical opening strategy cases were obtained. Every full board problem instance can be represented as a combination of a set of opening strategy casees. We propose a simple way of statically evaluating opening moves based on this analysis and a deiri calculation. A best move overall is then found as the candidate with the maximum value.