Ants

An ant evaluates every legal move by looking at the following local information: 1) The 3-by-3 neighbourhood of the point; and 2) the liberties of the blocks whose liberty count would be affected. Many fundamentals of the game of Go appear already in such a small neighbourhood as the 3 by 3. These include cuts, connections, walking stones, empty triangles, and (simple) eyes [13] (see Figure 2). Liberties are important in fighting, since they define when blocks are captured. Evaluations are defined here such that the burden of a block to its owner is directly relational to its size and diminishes exponentially when the block has more liberties. This makes sense, since it is more important whether a block has 1 or 2 liberties, than whether it has 11 or 12 liberties. The move evaluation has also some random noise added to it.

Figure 2: Examples of 3-by-3 neighbourhoods from left to right: 1. Stones go walking. A good place to play. 2. Connection for black or a cut for white. Very good for either player. 3. Simple eye. Black must avoid playing in there. 4. Empty triangle for black so black should avoid playing there.