Partial Information Endgame Databases

Building Chess Endgame Databases for Positions with many Pieces using A-priori Information

This note describes a possible solution to some endgames in chess with many pieces, when a complete retrograde database construction will fail because of the size of the problem and the time needed to build it up. The note shows how human knowledge, position-specific limitations and existing databases can be combined to prove a position to be won, drawn or lost, and providing the game theoretic...

Constructing Pin Endgame Databases for the Backgammon Variant Plakoto

Palamedes is an ongoing project for building expert playing bots that can play backgammon variants. Until recently the position evaluation relied only on self-trained neural networks. This paper describes the first attempt to augment Palamedes by constructing databases for certain endgame positions for the backgammon variant of Plakoto. The result is 5 databases containing 12,480,720 records in...

Best Play in Fanorona Leads to Draw

Fanorona is the national board game of Madagascar. The game’s complexity is approximately the same as that of checkers. In this article we present a search-based approach for weakly solving this game. It is a well-chosen combination of Proof-Number search and endgame databases. Retrograde analysis is used to generate the endgame databases in which every position with 7 or fewer pieces on the bo...

Safe and Nested Endgame Solving for Imperfect-Information Games

Unlike perfect-information games, imperfect-information games cannot be decomposed into subgames that are solved independently. Thus more computationally intensive equilibrium-finding techniques are used, and abstraction— in which a smaller version of the game is generated and solved—is essential. Endgame solving is the process of computing a (presumably) better strategy for just an endgame tha...

Challenges and Progress on Using Large Lossy Endgame Databases in Chinese Checkers