Conditional combinatorial games and their application to analyzing capturing races in Go
M. CARMEN MARTÍN · 2003
Conditional combinatorial games (CCG) are a new tool developed for describing loosely coupled games. The definition of CCG is based on the one for classical inde- pendent combinatorial games. However, play in a CCG depends on its global context: certain moves are legal only if a nonlocal context condition is currently true. Compared with independent combinatorial games, CCG only allow some weaker forms of pruning. The first part of this paper starts to develop a theory of CCG and gives some examples. In the second part, CCG are shown to be useful for studying capturing races called semeai in the game of Go. We introduce a general framework for analyzing semeai, which is based on CCG and on an extension called liberty count games. We show how this framework encompasses and extends our earlier work on solving semeai (M. M€