A System-Design Outline of the Distributed-Shogi-System Akara 2010

This paper describes Akara 2010, the distributed shogi system that has defeated a professional shogi player in a public game for the first time in history. The system employs a novel design to build a high-performance computer shogi player for standard tournament conditions. The design enhances the performance of the entire system by means of distributed computing. To utilize a large number of computers, a majority-voting method using four existing programs is combined with a distributed-search method. Although the performance of the entire system could not be tested, the majority-voting component increased the winning percentage from 62% to 73%, and the distributed-search component increased it from 50% to 70% or more.