Extracting human players’ Shogi game strategies from game records using growing SOM

Shogi game is similar to Chess and very popular in Japan. Computer Shogi programs are still in developing to defeat the professional human players. One of the main problems exists in estimating the circumstances of the game phases. It is said that there are three phases in the Shogi game, so called, opening, middle and endgame phase. The appropriate strategy to be selected differs depending on the proceeding phase. The professional human players classify states of the game phases properly. In this paper, we have carried out some experiments to extract human playerspsila strategies on Shogi game from game records using growing SOM. The results show the promising feature of the proposed method.