The Separation Game

The game of Go is an ancient two-player complete information game. It is yet unknown how to write strong playing programs for the game of Go, despite a lot of efforts . The usual approach that some of the best current programs use is based on a decomposition of the game into simpler sub-games. Examples of some of these well-known sub-games are the capture game, the connection game, the eye game or the life and death game. A sub-game that appears less often in the literature is the separation game . We present a search algorithm, based on generalized threat search , for the separation game, as well as optimizations that enable to solve separation problems faster than a naive algorithm. In section 2 the separation game is described. Section 3 deals with the empty separation game. In section 4 the evaluation function used in the search algorithm is given. Section 5 is about the selection of the interesting separation games. Section 6 details the search algorithm. Section 7 gives experimental results.