BILL : a table-based, knowledge-intensive othello program

A constant dilemma facing game-playing programs is whether to emphasize searching or knowledge. This paper describes a world-championship level Othello program, BILL, that succeeds in both dimensions. The success of BILL is largely due to its understanding of many important Othello features by using a pre-compiled knowledge base of board patterns. Because of this pre-compiled nature of its knowledge, BILL'S evaluation function simply consists of a series of table lookup's. It is therefore very fast. Additional key features of BILL include an iterativelydeepened zero-window search, an intelligent timing algorithm, an efficient, linked-move killer table, and a hash table. This paper contains detailed descriptions of the game of Othello and BILL, the results of BILL , and an outline for future research. -mis research was partly sponsored by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship. The views and conclusions contained m this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the National Science Foundation or the US Government