Abstract
A recently proposed ensemble approach to game-tree search has attracted a great deal of attention. The ensemble system consists of M computer players, where each player uses a different series of pseudo-random numbers. A combination of multiple players under the majority voting system would improve the performance of a Shogi-playing computer. We present a new strategy of move selection based on the search values of a number of players. The move decision is made by selecting one player from all M players. Each move is selected by referring to the evaluation value of the tree search of each player. The performance and mechanism of the strategy are examined. We show that the optimistic selection rule, which selects the player that yields the highest evaluation value, outperforms the majority voting system. By grouping 16 or more computer players straightforwardly, the winning rates of the strongest Shogi programs increase from 50 to 60% or even higher.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Knuth, D.E., Moore, R.W.: An Analysis of Alpha-Beta Pruning. Artificial Inteligence 6, 293–326 (1975)
Slate, D.J., Atkin, L.R.: Chess 4.5 – the northwestern university chess program. In: Frey, P.W. (ed.) Chess Skill in Man and Machine, pp. 82–118. Springer, Heidelberg (1977)
Moore, G.E.: Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits. Electronics 38, 114–117 (1965)
Hyatt, R.: The DTS High-performance Parallel Tree Search Algorithm, http://www.cis.uab.edu/info/faculty/hyatt/search.html
Hsu, F.-H.: IBS’s Deep Blue Chess Grandmaster Chips. IEEE Micro 19, 70–80 (1999)
Donninger, C., Lorenz, U.: The Chess Monster Hydra. In: Becker, J., Platzner, M., Vernalde, S. (eds.) FPL 2004. LNCS, vol. 3203, pp. 927–932. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Newborn, M.M.: Unsynchronized Iteratively Deepening Parallel Alpha-Beta Search. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence PAMI-10, 687–694 (1988)
Vučković, V.V.: The Method of the Chess Search Algorithms Parallelization using Two-processor Distributed System. In: Facta Universitatis. Series Mathematics an Informatics, vol. 22, pp. 175–188 (2007)
Brockington, M.G., Schaeffer, J.: The APHID Parallel alpha-beta Search Algorithm. In: IEEE Symposium of Parallel and Distributed Processing (SPDP 1996), New Orleans, October 23–26 (1996)
Himstedt, K., Lorenz, U., Möller, D.P.F.: A twofold distributed game-tree search approach using interconnected clusters. In: Luque, E., Margalef, T., Benítez, D. (eds.) Euro-Par 2008. LNCS, vol. 5168, pp. 587–598. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Polikar, R.: Ensemble Based Systems in Decision Making. IEEE Circuits and systems magazine 6, 21–45 (2006)
Hanawa, M., Ito, T.: The Council System in Brain Game. In: Cognitive Science and Entertainment Symposium, The University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan, pp. 72–75 (2009) (in Japanese)
Obata, T., Hanawa, M., Ito, T.: Consultation Algorithm in Brain Game: Performance of the Simple Majority System. In: Proceedings of the GI22 Conference of IPSJ, pp. 1–5 (2009) (in Japanese)
Ito, T.: Consultation Player “Monju” – A Majority Rule to Increasing the Winning Rate. IPSJ Journal 50, 887–894 (2009) (in Japanese)
Grimbergen, R.: The 19th CSA World Computer-Shogi Championship. ICGA Journal 32, 121–125 (2009)
Bonanza 4.1.2 is a computer Shogi program. Source codes are available from, http://www.geocities.jp/bonanza_shogi/ (in Japanese)
GPS Shogi is the first-prize winner of the 19th CSA World Computer-Shogi Championship, Source codes are available from, http://gps.tanaka.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/gpsshogi/ (in Japanese)
Iida, H., Sakuta, M., Rollason, J.: Computer Shogi. Artificial Intelligence 134, 121–144 (2002)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Sugiyama, T., Obata, T., Hoki, K., Ito, T. (2011). Optimistic Selection Rule Better Than Majority Voting System. In: van den Herik, H.J., Iida, H., Plaat, A. (eds) Computers and Games. CG 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6515. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17928-0_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17928-0_16
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-17927-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-17928-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)