Static Analysis of Life and Death in the Game of Go

This paper describes heuristic rules for static life/death analysis for general classes of groups in the game of Go, as implemented in authorsÕ world championship computer Go programs Go Intellect and HandTalk. We shall show that for many life and death problems in Go, the e€ect of a tree search can be approximated by a static analysis on the groupÕs interior and surroundings. We investigate eye-spaces with or without opponentÕs dead stones and try to provide a foundation towards conquering the combinatorial explosion of Go game tree. Ó 1999 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.