Abstract
For a position in the game of Hex, a fill pattern is a sub-position with one or more empty cells that can be filled without changing the position’s minimax value. A cell is prunable if it can be ignored when searching for a winning move. We introduce two new kinds of Hex fill – mutual and near-dead – and some resulting fill patterns; we show four new permanently-inferior fill patterns; and we present three new prune results, based on strong-reversing, reversing, and game-history respectively. Experiments show these results slightly reducing solving time on 8\(\,\times \,\)8 openings.
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We thank Chao Gao for many helpful comments and suggestions.
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Fabiano, N., Hayward, R. (2020). New Hex Patterns for Fill and Prune. In: Cazenave, T., van den Herik, J., Saffidine, A., Wu, IC. (eds) Advances in Computer Games. ACG 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12516. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65883-0_7
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