Automatic acquisition of pattern collocations in GO

The quality, quantity, and consistency of the knowledge used in GO-playing programs often determine their strengths, and automatic acquisition of large amounts of high-quality and consistent GO knowledge is crucial for successful GO playing. In a previous article of this subject, we have presented an algorithm for efficient and automatic acquisition of spatial patterns of GO as well as their frequency of occurrence from game records. In this article, we present two algorithms, one for efficient and automatic acquisition of pairs of spatial patterns that appear jointly in a local context, and the other for determining whether the joint pattern appearances are of certain significance statistically and not just a coincidence. Results of the two algorithms include 1 779 966 pairs of spatial patterns acquired automatically from 16 067 game records of professsional GO players, of which about 99.8% are qualified as pattern collocations with a statistical confidence of 99.5% or higher.