Shooting the last arrow.

摘要

Games provide a fruitful research area for Artificial Intelligence. For years, chess was considered the most significant field of computer game playing. However, in recent years the interest has shifted towards games that pose greater challenges than chess, such as Go and Amazons. The characteristic of such games is the large number of available moves in each position. Amazons offers an ideal test bed for existing and new search ideas.; This thesis presents the work behind Antiope, a strong Amazons program. The strength of Antiope lies in the use of endgame databases. Antiope is the first program to use endgame databases in Amazons. One type of databases store values related to Combinatorial Game Theory. This theory has been almost exclusively the domain of the mathematics community. This thesis presents the first investigation of adding Combinatorial Game Theory to a high-performance game-playing program.