Automatic Composition of Tsume-Shogi by Reverse Method

Abstract

Several techniques have been developed to solve puzzle problems in conventional AI, but there are few attempts to compose problems automatically by computers. Tsume-Shogi, a mating problem of Japanese Chess, is a kind of puzzles that is created and solved according to specific rules. This paper presents a system to compose Tsume-Shogi problems by reverse method. The search space increases enormously when the reverse method is adopted, but we can reduce it by using some constraints. We conducted several experiments with our method to compose Tsume-Shogi problems and showed that our system could compose some good short Tsume-Shogi problems and some special Kyuku-Tsume problems.