{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/a-novel-approach-to-solving-goal-achieving","title":"A Novel Approach to Solving Goal-Achieving Problems for Board Games","arxiv_id":"2112.02563","date":"2021-12-05","proceeding":null,"authors":["Chung-Chin Shih","Ti-Rong Wu","Ting Han Wei","I-Chen Wu"],"abstract":"Goal-achieving problems are puzzles that set up a specific situation with a clear objective. An example that is well-studied is the category of life-and-death (L&D) problems for Go, which helps players hone their skill of identifying region safety. Many previous methods like lambda search try null moves first, then derive so-called relevance zones (RZs), outside of which the opponent does not need to search. This paper first proposes a novel RZ-based approach, called the RZ-Based Search (RZS), to solving L&D problems for Go. RZS tries moves before determining whether they are null moves post-hoc. This means we do not need to rely on null move heuristics, resulting in a more elegant algorithm, so that it can also be seamlessly incorporated into AlphaZero's super-human level play in our solver. To repurpose AlphaZero for solving, we also propose a new training method called Faster to Life (FTL), which modifies AlphaZero to entice it to win more quickly. We use RZS and FTL to solve L&D problems on Go, namely solving 68 among 106 problems from a professional L&D book while a previous program solves 11 only. Finally, we discuss that the approach is generic in the sense that RZS is applicable to solving many other goal-achieving problems for board games.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.02563v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.02563v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"a-novel-approach-to-solving-goal-achieving","repo_url":"https://github.com/rockmanray/rzone","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"GPL-3.0"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"board-games","task_name":"Board Games"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"alphazero","method_name":"AlphaZero"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2112.02563","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2112.02563","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}