DOI:10.6129/CJP.201909_61(3).0001
Chinese Journal of Psychology 2019, Vol.61, No.3, 173-196
Cognitive Abilities in the Game of Go during the Opening, Middle, and Endgame Phases: When Experimental Psychology Meets Artificial Intelligence
Der-Yow Chen（Department of Psychology, National Cheng Kung University）；Chi-Lin Yu（Department of Psychology, National Cheng Kung University；Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University）；Ching-Wen Su（Department of Psychology, National Cheng Kung University）；Kuan-Hung Liao（Department of Psychology, National Cheng Kung University；Chinese Taipei Go Association）；Hsiang-Yun Hsiao（Department of Psychology, National Cheng Kung University）
Abstract
The game of Go, also called Weiqi or Baduk, is one of the most sophisticated board games in the world. The players compete with each other by surrounding more territory using their stones. There are three phases in a game of Go, including the opening, middle, and endgame. Only a very few psychological studies have investigated the underlying processes or neural mechanisms used while playing Go. It has been suggested that some cognitive abilities may be important during the game, but the recruitment of different kinds of cognitive abilities in three phases is still unknown. The present study addressed this issue by combining experimental psychology approaches and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. Twenty-four Go players tried their best to quickly answer 48 Go questions in each of three phases, with different cognitive interference tasks appearing simultaneously. Their accuracy and reaction time on these questions were recorded as their performance. The Go questions were designed and organized by a professional Go player, and some basic requirements for psychological experiments were met. In addition to a control task, there were three types of interference tasks: a visual spatial search, logical reasoning, and calculation. The results showed that the spatial interference task decreased the accuracy in the opening phase, suggesting that spatial ability is the most important cognitive ability used in the opening of a Go game. The logical reasoning interference task decreased the accuracy in the middle and endgame phases, implying that reasoning ability is very critical in these phases. The calculation task had a less significant interference effect. In addition, we used three AI-related algorithms to classify the subjects’ performance in the three phases of Go questions under different degrees of cognitive interference. The results showed that these algorithms had much better than chance accuracy to correctly classify the performance in three different phases of Go questions or under different degrees of cognitive interference. Cross validation procedures ensured the generalizability, and permutation tests also indicated that the predictive accuracy of these models was statistically significant. We thus argue that there are indeed different cognitive representations in these three phases under different levels of interference. In summary, in the present study, an experimental approach was adopted to reveal the involvement of cognitive abilities in three phases of Go. In addition, we provide a new perspective for experimental psychology by introducing an AI-related analysis of multivariate data, which infers that artificial intelligence can have a greater influence and make a greater contribution to the understanding of psychology and human intelligence.
Keywords: artificial intelligence, calculation ability, game of Go, logical reasoning, spatial ability.
