Chess, Shogi, Go, natural developments in game research

In game programming research there are four interesting and related domains: chess, xiang qi (Chinese chess), shogi (Japanese chess) and go. In this article we will compare chess with shogi, both comparing the rules and the computational aspects of both games. We will see that chess and shogi are very similar, but that there are some important differences that complicate game programming for shogi. Most important difference is the game tree complexity, which is considerably higher than the game tree complexity of chess. We will then argue that these similarities and differences make shogi a good choice for further research in game programming. Chess will soon no longer be competitively interesting. Xiang qi has a game tree complexity similar to chess, suggesting that the same AI techniques will also be successful in this domain. Go is too risky as a next research target because little is known about the cognitive aspects of the game, which in our view hold the key to developing new tec..