Learning to score final positions in the game of Go

This article investigates the application of machine-learning techniques for the task of scoring final positions in the game of Go. Neural network classifiers are trained to classify life and death from labelled 9×9 game records. The performance is compared to standard classifiers from statistical pattern recognition. A recursive framework for classification is used to improve performance iteratively. Using a maximum of four iterations our cascaded scoring architecture (CSA*) scores 98.9% of the positions correctly. Nearly all incorrectly scored positions are recognised (they can be corrected by a human operator). By providing reliable score information CSA* opens the large source of Go knowledge implicitly available in human game records for automatic extraction. It thus paves the way for a successful application of machine learning in Go.