Recognizing Seki in Computer Go

Seki is a situation of coexistence in the game of Go, where neither player can profitably capture the opponent's stones. This paper presents a new method for deciding whether an enclosed area is or can become a seki. The method combines local search with global-level static analysis. Local search is used to identify possible seki, and reasoning on the global level is applied to de- termine which stones are safe with territory, which coexist in a seki and which are dead. Experimental results show that a safety-of-territory solver enhanced by this method can successfully recognize a large variety of local and global scale test positions related to seki. In contrast, the well-known program GNU Go can solve only easier problems from a test collection.