Home // International Journal On Advances in Software, volume 5, numbers 1 and 2, 2012 // View article

Seeing the Big Picture: Influence of Global Factors on Local Decisions

Authors:
Terry Bossomaier
Michael Harré
Vaenthan Thiruvarudchelvan

Keywords: game of go, decision making, entropy, online data mining

Abstract:
This paper extends recent work studying the development of human expertise in the game of Go. Although it appears like a simple game on the surface, Go is actually the most difficult of all established games for artificial intelligence, with no computer program yet reaching the top international level on a full 19×19 board. On smaller boards with sizes like 9×9, computers are competitive, implying that the understanding of complex global interactions is the key to human superiority. The temporal analysis of game positions yields some interesting insights in into local/global analysis. By mining thousands of positions from online games, we show that at some player levels, the sequence of plays leading up to a local position is a stronger determinant of the next move than the position alone. This suggests that the sequence of plays is an indicator of global strategic factors and thus provides a context for the next move in addition to the local position. Using perceptual templates introduced in other work, we demonstrate that this global context appears at the very earliest stages of cognition.

Pages: 121 to 130

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2012. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 30, 2012

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2628