15 research outputs found
Regular Boardgames
We propose a new General Game Playing (GGP) language called Regular
Boardgames (RBG), which is based on the theory of regular languages. The
objective of RBG is to join key properties as expressiveness, efficiency, and
naturalness of the description in one GGP formalism, compensating certain
drawbacks of the existing languages. This often makes RBG more suitable for
various research and practical developments in GGP. While dedicated mostly for
describing board games, RBG is universal for the class of all finite
deterministic turn-based games with perfect information. We establish
foundations of RBG, and analyze it theoretically and experimentally, focusing
on the efficiency of reasoning. Regular Boardgames is the first GGP language
that allows efficient encoding and playing games with complex rules and with
large branching factor (e.g.\ amazons, arimaa, large chess variants, go,
international checkers, paper soccer).Comment: AAAI 201
Exploring algorithms to recognize similar board states in Arimaa
The game of Arimaa was invented as a challenge to the field of game-playing artificial intelligence, which had grown somewhat haughty after IBM\u27s supercomputer Deep Blue trounced world champion Kasparov at chess. Although Arimaa is simple enough for a child to learn and can be played with an ordinary chess set, existing game-playing algorithms and techniques have had a difficult time rising up to the challenge of defeating the world\u27s best human Arimaa players, mainly due to the game\u27s impressive branching factor. This thesis introduces and analyzes new algorithms and techniques that attempt to recognize similar board states based on relative piece strength in a concentrated area of the board. Using this data, game-playing programs would be able to recognize patterns in order to discern tactics and moves that could lead to victory or defeat in similar situations based on prior experience
A Survey of Monte Carlo Tree Search Methods
Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) is a recently proposed search method that combines the precision of tree search with the generality of random sampling. It has received considerable interest due to its spectacular success in the difficult problem of computer Go, but has also proved beneficial in a range of other domains. This paper is a survey of the literature to date, intended to provide a snapshot of the state of the art after the first five years of MCTS research. We outline the core algorithm's derivation, impart some structure on the many variations and enhancements that have been proposed, and summarize the results from the key game and nongame domains to which MCTS methods have been applied. A number of open research questions indicate that the field is ripe for future work
Improving Hearthstone AI by Combining MCTS and Supervised Learning Algorithms
We investigate the impact of supervised prediction models on the strength and
efficiency of artificial agents that use the Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)
algorithm to play a popular video game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. We
overview our custom implementation of the MCTS that is well-suited for games
with partially hidden information and random effects. We also describe
experiments which we designed to quantify the performance of our Hearthstone
agent's decision making. We show that even simple neural networks can be
trained and successfully used for the evaluation of game states. Moreover, we
demonstrate that by providing a guidance to the game state search heuristic, it
is possible to substantially improve the win rate, and at the same time reduce
the required computations.Comment: Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence
and Games (CIG'18); pages 445-452; ISBN: 978-1-5386-4358-
General Board Game Concepts
Many games often share common ideas or aspects between them, such as their
rules, controls, or playing area. However, in the context of General Game
Playing (GGP) for board games, this area remains under-explored. We propose to
formalise the notion of "game concept", inspired by terms generally used by
game players and designers. Through the Ludii General Game System, we describe
concepts for several levels of abstraction, such as the game itself, the moves
played, or the states reached. This new GGP feature associated with the ludeme
representation of games opens many new lines of research. The creation of a
hyper-agent selector, the transfer of AI learning between games, or explaining
AI techniques using game terms, can all be facilitated by the use of game
concepts. Other applications which can benefit from game concepts are also
discussed, such as the generation of plausible reconstructed rules for
incomplete ancient games, or the implementation of a board game recommender
system
Evolutionary Artificial Neural Network Weight Tuning to Optimize Decision Making for an Abstract Game
Abstract strategy games present a deterministic perfect information environment with which to test the strategic capabilities of artificial intelligence systems. With no unknowns or random elements, only the competitors’ performances impact the results. This thesis takes one such game, Lines of Action, and attempts to develop a competitive heuristic. Due to the complexity of Lines of Action, artificial neural networks are utilized to model the relative values of board states. An application, pLoGANN (Parallel Lines of Action with Genetic Algorithm and Neural Networks), is developed to train the weights of this neural network by implementing a genetic algorithm over a distributed environment. While pLoGANN proved to be designed efficiently, it failed to produce a competitive Lines of Action player, shedding light on the difficulty of developing a neural network to model such a large and complex solution space
On monte carlo tree search and reinforcement learning
Fuelled by successes in Computer Go, Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) has achieved widespread
adoption within the games community. Its links to traditional reinforcement learning (RL)
methods have been outlined in the past; however, the use of RL techniques within tree search has
not been thoroughly studied yet. In this paper we re-examine in depth this close relation between
the two fields; our goal is to improve the cross-awareness between the two communities. We show
that a straightforward adaptation of RL semantics within tree search can lead to a wealth of new
algorithms, for which the traditional MCTS is only one of the variants. We confirm that planning
methods inspired by RL in conjunction with online search demonstrate encouraging results on
several classic board games and in arcade video game competitions, where our algorithm recently
ranked first. Our study promotes a unified view of learning, planning, and search
Monte Carlo Tree Search for games with Hidden Information and Uncertainty
Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is an AI technique
that has been successfully applied to many deterministic games
of perfect information, leading to large advances in a number of domains,
such as Go and General Game Playing.
Imperfect information games are less well studied in the field of AI
despite being popular and of significant commercial interest,
for example in the case of computer and mobile adaptations of turn based board and card games.
This is largely because hidden information and uncertainty
leads to a large increase in complexity compared to perfect information games.
In this thesis MCTS is extended to games with hidden information and uncertainty
through the introduction of the Information Set MCTS (ISMCTS) family of algorithms.
It is demonstrated that ISMCTS can handle hidden information and uncertainty
in a variety of complex board and card games.
This is achieved whilst preserving the general applicability of MCTS
and using computational budgets appropriate for use in a commercial game.
The ISMCTS algorithm is shown to outperform the existing approach of Perfect Information Monte Carlo (PIMC) search.
Additionally it is shown that ISMCTS can be used to solve two known issues with PIMC search,
namely strategy fusion and non-locality.
ISMCTS has been integrated into a commercial game, Spades by AI Factory,
with over 2.5 million downloads.
The Information Capture And ReUSe (ICARUS) framework is also introduced in this thesis.
The ICARUS framework generalises MCTS enhancements in terms of information capture (from MCTS simulations)
and reuse (to improve MCTS tree and simulation policies).
The ICARUS framework is used to express existing enhancements,
to provide a tool to design new ones,
and to rigorously define how MCTS enhancements can be combined.
The ICARUS framework is tested across a wide variety of games