Static analysis of life and death in the game of Go

This paper describes heuristic rules for static life/death analysis for gen eral classes of groups in the game of Go, as implemented in authors' world championship computer Go programs Go Intellect and HandTalk. We shall show that for many life and death problems in Go, the effect of a tree search ca n be approximated by a static analysis on the group's interior and surround ings. We investigate eye-spaces with or without opponent's dead stones and try to provide a foundation towards conquering the combinatorial explosion of Go game tree. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.