Design and implementation aspects of a Surakarta program

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Chen, Yen-Chi | Yeh, Jia-Fong | Lin, Shun-Shii^{; *}

Affiliations: Department of CSIE, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. E-mail: linss@csie.ntnu.edu.tw.

Abstract: In this paper, we present the techniques, such as bitboard, iterative-deepening aspiration search algorithm, endgame tablebase, used in our Surakarta program Fuchou. A bijective function similar to Schadd’s is developed to map a Surakarta board position to a unique address of the endgame tablebase. The function is one-to-one and onto and can be computed very quickly using some techniques compared to conventional methods. We have implemented it on our Surakarta program FuChou. Experimental results show that we have gotten advantages of speedup as well as accuracy on the endgame boards.

Keywords: endgame tablebase, alpha-beta search, bitboard, iterative-deepening aspiration search, computer games, Surakarta

DOI: 10.3233/ICG-180071

Journal: ICGA Journal, vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 438-449, 2018