Stronger Virtual Connections in Hex

For connection games such as Hex or Y or Havannah, finding guaranteed cell-to-cell connection strategies can be a computational bottleneck. In automated players and solvers, sets of such virtual connections are often found with Anshelevich's H-search algorithm: initialize trivial connections, and then repeatedly apply an AND-rule (for combining connections in series) and an OR-rule (for combining connections in parallel). We present FastVC Search, a new algorithm for finding such connections. FastVC Search is more effective than H-search when finding a representative set of connections quickly is more important than finding a larger set of connections slowly. We tested FastVC Search in an alpha-beta player Wolve, a Monte Carlo tree search player MoHex, and a proof number search implementation called Solver. It does not strengthen Wolve, but it significantly strengthens MoHex and Solver.