Tactical Search
One of the main concerns for a Go player is which groups of stones can be kept alive and which can be captured. This general class of problems is known as life and death. The most direct strategy for calculating life and death is to perform a tree search on the moves which potentially affect the stones in question, and then to record the status of the stones at the end of the main line of play.
However, within time and memory constraints, it is not generally possible to determine with complete accuracy which moves could affect the 'life' of a group of stones. This implies that some heuristic must be applied to select which moves to consider. The net effect is that for any given program, there is a trade-off between playing speed and life and death reading abilities.
With Benson's algorithm, it is possible to determine the chains which are unconditionally alive and therefore would not need to be checked in the future for safety.
Read more about this topic: Computer Go
Famous quotes containing the word search:
“Still, I search in these woods and find nothing worse
than myself, caught between the grapes and the thorns.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)