Solving Kriegspiel-Like Problems: Examining Efficient Search Methods
Makoto Sakuta6
and Hiroyuki Iida6 
| (6) |
Department of Computer Science, Shizuoka University, 3-5-1 Johoku, Hamamatsu 432-8011, Japan |
Abstract
We recently proposed a deterministic approach for solving problems with uncertainty, called the Uncertainty Paradigm. Under
this paradigm, deterministic solving of such a problem is resolved into a plain AND/OR-tree search. The search under this
paradigm is denoted by the Uncertainty Paradigm Search (UPS). As an application, we have chosen the domain of Tsuitate-Tsume-Shogi,
which is the mating problem of Kriegspiel-like variant of Shogi. The early implementation of UPSwas based on a simple depth-first
full-width search with iterative deepening (ID), which was unable to solve several hard problems. This paper explores an efficient
search method using UPDS (Uncertainty Paradigm PDS) algorithm, which is a specialized version of PDS (Proof-number and Disproof-number
Search) for UPS. UPDS generally performs better than ID or PDS, but fails to solve some easy problems. In addition, several
variations of UPDS and ID have also been examined to tackle some hardest problems. All problems in the test set have been
solved by a particular variation of UPDS, which shows superiority of the depth-first variants of the proof-number search in
UPS.
Keywords Problem solving - Uncertainty Paradigm - Metaposition - Metamove - UPS - Tsuitate-Tsume-Shogi - PDS - Kriegspiel
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