Belief-Guided Decision Making with Uncertainty Gating in the Game of Go

Abstract

Recent advancements in Computer Go, driven by AlphaZero and MuZero, rely heavily on Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to correct the errors of the neural network policy. While effective on massive computational clusters, this dependence creates a critical bottleneck on consumer-grade hardware, where the computational cost of tree management severely limits inference rates. Furthermore, without deep search, these models suffer from hallucination, proposing moves with high confidence that are strategically fatal. This paper introduces a novel Belief-Guided architecture that disentangles the Policy head from a distinct Belief head. Unlike traditional value functions, the Belief head acts as an internal simulator and independent critic, modeling epistemic uncertainty and strategic stability. By integrating memory mechanisms (Transformer/GRU) to handle long-term dependencies and the Ko rule, and utilizing a gating mechanism to filter overconfident policy errors, our model shifts the burden of intelligence from runtime search to parametric "intuition." Experimental results demonstrate that this approach significantly improves search-free win rates and reduces hallucination, enabling professional-level play on limited hardware where massive MCTS is infeasible.