The endgame of Lines of Action (LOA) is problematic because (1) LOA evaluation functions are not good predictors in the case of forced wins and (2) the state-space complexity of the LOA endgame is too large to use endgame databases. Because of the frequency of forced moves and the mobility component in the LOA endgame the utility of proof-number (PN) search is investigated in this paper. Also t...

In playing Ayo game, both opening and endgames are often stylized. The opening is very interesting with both players showing skills by the speed of their movements. However, there exists an endgame strategy in Ayo game called Completely Determined Game (CDG) such that its usefulness for ending a game should be apparent. In this paper, we present the CDG as a class of endgame strategy and descri...

John Nunn received the EGT for KRPKNP just in time to analyse the subtleties of the Kramnik-Topalov World Chess Championship Game 2 (Chessbase, 2006a) which saw the players trade a half point back and forth at moves 53b and 55w. In a demonstration of the power of the web-fuelled community, all 6-man endgame tables have now been promulgated to a considerable degree by Kyrill Kryukov's (2008) pee...

Complete tablebases, indicating best moves for every position, exist for chess endgames. There is no doubt that tablebases contain a wealth of knowledge, however, mining for this knowledge, manually or automatically, proved as extremely difficult. Recently, we developed an approach that combines specialized minimax search with argumentbased machine learning (ABML) paradigm. In this paper, we pu...

Chess endgame strategies in a concise and intuitive way describe the rules the player should follow to ensure win (or draw). Endgame strategies are useful for both computer and human players. Their correctness can be proved in several ways, and in this paper we present one of them: computer assisted proof based on reduction to propositional logic, more precisely to SAT. We focus on a strategy f...

The UCT algorithm has gained popularity for use in AI for games, especially in board games. This paper assess the performance of UCT-based AIs and the effectiveness of augmenting them with a lookup table containing evaluations of games states in the game of Chinese Checkers. Our lookup table is only guaranteed to be correct during the endgame, but serves as an accurate heuristic throughout the ...

Noise appears to critique the prevailing cognitive and social habits of modernity by providing concrete and particular art objects that demand attention and jar us from one-dimensional life. Noise sounds, for a moment, like a true alternative not only to contemporary music but to a whole way of thinking through abstract generalisation and living through commercial mediation. Understood in this ...

We explain how the prototype automatic chess problem composer, Chesthetica, successfully composed a rare and interesting chess problem using the new Digital Synaptic Neural Substrate (DSNS) computational creativity approach. This problem represents a greater challenge from a creative standpoint because the checkmate is not always clear and the method of winning even less so. Creating a decisive...