A small Go board study of metric and dimensional evaluation functions

Abstract

The difficulty of writing successful 19 x 19 Go programs lies not only in the combinatorial complexity of Go but also in the complexity of designing a good evaluation function containing a lot of knowledge. Leaving these obstacles aside, this paper defines very-little-knowledge evaluation functions used by programs playing on very small boards. The evaluation functions are based on two mathematical tools, distance and dimension, and not on domain-dependent knowledge. After a qualitative assessment of each evaluation function, we built several programs playing on 4 x 4 boards by using tree search associated with these evaluation functions. We set up an experiment to select the best programs and identify the relevant features of these evaluation functions. From the results obtained by these very-little-knowledge-based programs, we can judge the usefulness of each evaluation function. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.