Natural Developments in Game Research

Abstract

In game-programming research there are four interesting and related domains Chess, Xiang Qi (Chinese chess), Shogi (Japanese chess) and Go. In this article we compare Chess with Shogi by rules and by computational aspects. We will see that Chess and Shogi are mostly very similar, but that there are some important differences which complicate Shogi programming. The most important difference is the game-tree complexity, which is considerably higher than the game-tree complexity of Chess.

We will then argue that the similarities and differences make Shogi a good choice for advanced research in game programming. In the near future Chess will no longer be competitively interesting. Since Xiang Qi has a game-tree complexity similar to Chess, the same AI techniques will also be successful in this domain, and, as a consequence, this game will also no longer be interesting. Go is too risky as a next research target because little is known about the cognitive aspects of the game, which in our view hold the key to developing new techniques.

A short history of computer Shogi with the results of the latest CSA computer Shogi tournament is given. Conclusions are provided in Section 5. In the appendix, a short introduction to the rules of the game is included.