電気通信大学の保木特任教授がカナダのアルバータ大学でコンピュータ将棋とボナンザの最近の進歩についてセミナー

ボナンザの開発者の電気通信大学特任教授の保木氏が２月３日にカナダのアルバータ大学でコンピュータ将棋とボナンザの最近の進歩についてセミナーを行うことが、同大学のウェブサイトで予告された。

• Recent advances in computer shogi and the Bonanza program | Department of Computing Science

February 3, 2012 - 12:00pm - 1:00pm

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Shogi is one of the major variants of chess. The material balance is less important and the branching factor is greater than in Western chess. Because of these properties, creating a decent computer shogi player was a difficult challenge. When Deep Blue defeated the World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, the most advanced Shogi program at that time was no better than an ordinary amateur player. Recently, computer shogi programs have started to defeat human experts. The program Akara2010 defeated one of the top female shogi professionals in 2010, another program, Ponanza, achieved the highest rating in blitz games among all players in the most popular online shogi server, Shogi Club 24, in 2011, and most recently Bonkras defeated a retired top professional player, Yonenaga, in 2012. In this talk, two main features of the computer shogi program Bonanza, one of the strongest shogi programs, will be presented. One main feature is the optimization method used to train the full evaluation function with more than ten million parameters. The other is a game tree search method which is more brute-force and less selective than other popular approaches. We close with some comparisons of the algorithmic differences between chess programs and Bonanza.

予告文を見ると、Bonkras の米長永世棋聖からの勝利にも触れていて、非常にタイムリーなセミナーのようである（電王戦以前に決まっていた企画かもしれないが、電気王戦から１ヶ月たたないうちに、Bonkras が下敷きにした Bonanza の開発者が海外でセミナーを持つというのは画期的なことだと思う）。