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Computer chess-playing is an area of artificial intelligence research. Most of the time, it focuses on the design of chess-playing software to play games with complete information in which all of the players know the other players' preferences. Chinese dark chess is an incomplete information game with probabilities, which is not the same as complete information games, such as chess or Chinese chess. If we use conventional game-tree searching techniques to play Chinese dark chess, then the number of branches will be very large because there are lots of moves for both “dark pieces” and “bright pieces”. Hence, it is impractical to generates all possible moves in a given board position in order to find a good move. During and after participating in the competitions of ICGA 2010, TAAI 2010 and final project of NTU game theory course, we found that today most state-of-the-art Chinese dark chess programs, including those developed by NTNU, NTU, and NDHU, still could not play well in moving the “bright pieces” or flipping the “dark pieces”. Due to this phenomenon, most of the Chinese dark chess matches result in a draw even if one player has a large material advantage over the other. In this thesis, we propose some approaches to fix the problem. We provide a path tracing method to compute more accurately the influence among the chess pieces according to their walking distances. The experimental results indicate that our program "Black Cat" obtained a winning rate of 56.0% against the program "Dark Chess Beta" which won the Silver medals at the ICGA 2010 and TAAI 2010.
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