Eur. Phys. J. B (2014) 87: 246
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2014-50497-1

Regular Article

Move ordering and communities in complex networks describing the game of go

¹ Université de Toulouse, UPS, Laboratoire de Physique Théorique (IRSAMC), 31062 Toulouse, France
² CNRS, LPT (IRSAMC), 31062 Toulouse, France
³ LPTMS, CNRS and Université Paris-Sud, UMR 8626 Bât. 100, 91405 Orsay, France

^a e-mail: olivier.giraud@lptms.u-psud.fr

Received: 23 July 2014
Received in final form: 5 September 2014
Published online: 22 October 2014

Abstract

We analyze the game of go from the point of view of complex networks. We construct three different directed networks of increasing complexity, defining nodes as local patterns on plaquettes of increasing sizes, and links as actual successions of these patterns in databases of real games. We discuss the peculiarities of these networks compared to other types of networks. We explore the ranking vectors and community structure of the networks and show that this approach enables to extract groups of moves with common strategic properties. We also investigate different networks built from games with players of different levels or from different phases of the game. We discuss how the study of the community structure of these networks may help to improve the computer simulations of the game. More generally, we believe such studies may help to improve the understanding of human decision process.