Design and Implementation of Chinese Dark Chess Programs

An analysis for strength improvement of an MCTS-based program playing Chinese dark chess

“…Chinese dark chess (CDC) [12,47], widely played in Chinese community, is a two-player zero-sum non-deterministic game played on a 4 × 8 square board as illustrated in Fig. 1(a) and (b).…”

“…Weights in [47] 5500 5000 2500 1000 800 3000 800 Weights in this paper 55 50 25 10 8 30 8 Two kinds of actions are allowed in CDC: flipping and moving. Each flipping action flips a piece, namely making the piece type revealed.…”

“…A piece that can be captured by another piece p as above is said to be capturable by p in this paper. Cannons have a different capturing rule called one-step-jump [12,47] in which any opponent pieces in the same row/column can be captured by jumping over exactly one piece in that row/column. For example, in Fig.…”

“…In [47], Yen et al estimated the game tree complexity with chance nodes to be 10 207 between those of Chinese chess and Shogi.…”

“…This paper incorporates the above four techniques into an MCTS-based CDC program, named DarkKnight which won two CDC tournaments [42,48] including the 17th Computer Olympiad, and analyzes how well these techniques can improve the game-playing strength.…”