{"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/alphazero-based-proof-cost-network-to-aid","title":"AlphaZero-based Proof Cost Network to Aid Game Solving","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2021-09-29","proceeding":"ICLR 2022 4","authors":["Ti-Rong Wu","Chung-Chin Shih","Ting Han Wei","Meng-Yu Tsai","Wei-Yuan Hsu","I-Chen Wu"],"abstract":"In recent years, the AlphaZero algorithm has achieved super-human playing levels for many games without hand-crafted expert knowledge. Researchers have taken advantage of AlphaZero's effectiveness at learning and playing games to help in solving them. However, a strong player is not necessarily a strong solver. This paper proposes a novel approach to solving problems by modifying the training target of the AlphaZero algorithm, such that it prioritizes solving the game quickly, rather than winning. We train a Proof Cost Network (PCN), where proof cost is a heuristic that estimates the amount of work required to solve problems. This matches the general concept of the so-called proof number from proof number search, which has been shown to be well-suited for game solving. We propose two specific training targets. The first finds the shortest path to a solution, while the second estimates the proof cost. We conduct experiments on solving 15x15 Gomoku and 9x9 Killall-Go problems with both MCTS-based and FDFPN solvers. Comparisons between using AlphaZero networks and PCN as heuristics show that PCN can solve more problems.","url_abs":"https://openreview.net/forum?id=nKWjE4QF1hB","url_pdf":"https://openreview.net/pdf?id=nKWjE4QF1hB","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":"alphazero-based-proof-cost-network-to-aid","repo_url":"https://github.com/kds285/proof-cost-network","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"board-games","task_name":"Board Games"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"alphazero","method_name":"AlphaZero"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}