Abstract
In Hex two players try to connect opposing sides by placing pieces onto a rhombus-shaped board of hexagons. The game has a high strategic complexity and the number of possible board positions is larger than in Chess. There are already some Hex programs of recognizable strength, but which still play on a level below very strong human players. One of their major weaknesses is the time for evaluating a board.
In this work we apply machine learning for the computer player to improve his play by generating an fast evaluation function and lookup procedure for pattern endgame databases. The data structures used are neural networks for the evaluation of a position and limited branching trees to determine if a position can be classified as won or lost.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Anshelevich, V.V.: The game of hex: An automatic theorem proving approach to game programming. In: National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pp. 189–194 (2000)
Browne, C.: Hex Strategy: Making the Right Connections. A. K. Peters (2000)
Gale, D.: The game of hex and the brouwer fixed point theorem. American Mathematical Monthly 86, 818–827 (1979)
Gardner, M.: The Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions. Simon and Schuster, New York (1959)
Gardner, M.: The Second Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions. Simon and Schuster, New York (1961)
Hoffmann, J., Koehler, J.: A new method to index and query sets. In: IJCAI. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 462–467 (1999)
Junghanns, A.: Pushing the Limits: New Developments in Single-Agent Search. PhD thesis, University of Alberta (1999)
Kahl, K.: Maschinelle Lernverfahren für das Strategiespiel Hex. Diplomarbeit, Universität Dortmund (2007)
Litovski, V.B., Zwolinski, M.: VLSI Circuit Simulation and Optimization. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht (1996)
Nash, J.: Some games and machines for playing them. Technical report, Rand Corporation (1952)
Nissen, S.: Implementation of a fast artificial neural network library (FANN). Technical report, Department of Computer Science University of Copenhagen (2003)
Reisch, S.: Hex ist PSPACE-vollständig. Acta Informatica 15(2), 167–191 (1981)
Schaeffer, J., Björnsson, Y., Burch, N., Kishimoto, A., Müller, M., Lake, R., Lu, P., Sutphen, S.: Solving checkers. In: IJCAI. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 292–297 (2005)
Shannon, C.E.: Programming a computer for playing chess. Philosophical Magazine 41, 256–275 (1950)
Java Native Interface, Javasoft’s Native Interface for Java (1997)
Sutton, R.S.: Learning to predict by the methods of temporal differences. Machine Learning 3, 9–44 (1988)
Tesauro, G.: Practical issues in temporal difference learning. Machine Learning 8, 257–277 (1992)
Thrun, S.: Learning to play the game of chess. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, vol. 7 (1995)
Tischbierek, R.: Nur das Schach hat verloren. Deutsche Schachzeitung 1, 4–14 (2007)
Yang, J., Liao, S., Pawlak, M.: On a decomposition method for finding winning strategy in hex game. In: Internat. Conf. Application and Development of Computer Games, pp. 96–111 (2001)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Kahl, K., Edelkamp, S., Hildebrand, L. (2007). Learning How to Play Hex. In: Hertzberg, J., Beetz, M., Englert, R. (eds) KI 2007: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. KI 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4667. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74565-5_29
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74565-5_29
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-74564-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-74565-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)