Summarizing Strategy Card Game AI Competition

This paper concludes five years of AI competitions based on Legends of Code and Magic (LOCM), a small Collectible Card Game (CCG), designed with the goal of supporting research and algorithm development. The game was used in a number of events, including Community Contests on the CodinGame platform, and Strategy Card Game AI Competition at the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation and IEEE Conference on Games. LOCM has been used in a number of publications related to areas such as game tree search algorithms, neural networks, evaluation functions, and CCG deckbuilding. We present the rules of the game, the history of organized competitions, and a listing of the participant and their approaches, as well as some general advice on organizing AI competitions for the research community. Although the COG 2022 edition was announced to be the last one, the game remains available and can be played using an online leaderboard arena

Automated Playtesting in Collectible Card Games using Evolutionary Algorithms: a Case Study in HearthStone

Collectible card games have been among the most popular and profitable products of the entertainment industry since the early days of Magic: The GatheringTM in the nineties. Digital versions have also appeared, with HearthStone: Heroes of WarCraftTM being one of the most popular. In Hearthstone, every player can play as a hero, from a set of nine, and build his/her deck before the game from a big pool of available cards, including both neutral and hero-specific cards. This kind of games offers several challenges for researchers in artificial intelligence since they involve hidden information, unpredictable behaviour, and a large and rugged search space. Besides, an important part of player engagement in such games is a periodical input of new cards in the system, which mainly opens the door to new strategies for the players. Playtesting is the method used to check the new card sets for possible design flaws, and it is usually performed manually or via exhaustive search; in the case of Hearthstone, such test plays must take into account the chosen hero, with its specific kind of cards. In this paper, we present a novel idea to improve and accelerate the playtesting process, systematically exploring the space of possible decks using an Evolutionary Algorithm (EA). This EA creates HearthStone decks which are then played by an AI versus established human-designed decks. Since the space of possible combinations that are play-tested is huge, search through the space of possible decks has been shortened via a new heuristic mutation operator, which is based on the behaviour of human players modifying their decks. Results show the viability of our method for exploring the space of possible decks and automating the play-testing phase of game design. The resulting decks, that have been examined for balancedness by an expert player, outperform human-made ones when played by the AI; the introduction of the new heuristic operator helps to improve the obtained solutions, and basing the study on the whole set of heroes shows its validity through the whole range of decks

Helping AI to Play Hearthstone: AAIA'17 Data Mining Challenge

This paper summarizes the AAIA'17 Data Mining Challenge: Helping AI to Play Hearthstone which was held between March 23, and May 15, 2017 at the Knowledge Pit platform. We briefly describe the scope and background of this competition in the context of a more general project related to the development of an AI engine for video games, called Grail. We also discuss the outcomes of this challenge and demonstrate how predictive models for the assessment of player's winning chances can be utilized in a construction of an intelligent agent for playing Hearthstone. Finally, we show a few selected machine learning approaches for modeling state and action values in Hearthstone. We provide evaluation for a few promising solutions that may be used to create more advanced types of agents, especially in conjunction with Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithms.Comment: Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, Prague (FedCSIS-2017) (Prague, Czech Republic

Covariance Matrix Adaptation for the Rapid Illumination of Behavior Space

We focus on the challenge of finding a diverse collection of quality solutions on complex continuous domains. While quality diver-sity (QD) algorithms like Novelty Search with Local Competition (NSLC) and MAP-Elites are designed to generate a diverse range of solutions, these algorithms require a large number of evaluations for exploration of continuous spaces. Meanwhile, variants of the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) are among the best-performing derivative-free optimizers in single-objective continuous domains. This paper proposes a new QD algorithm called Covariance Matrix Adaptation MAP-Elites (CMA-ME). Our new algorithm combines the self-adaptation techniques of CMA-ES with archiving and mapping techniques for maintaining diversity in QD. Results from experiments based on standard continuous optimization benchmarks show that CMA-ME finds better-quality solutions than MAP-Elites; similarly, results on the strategic game Hearthstone show that CMA-ME finds both a higher overall quality and broader diversity of strategies than both CMA-ES and MAP-Elites. Overall, CMA-ME more than doubles the performance of MAP-Elites using standard QD performance metrics. These results suggest that QD algorithms augmented by operators from state-of-the-art optimization algorithms can yield high-performing methods for simultaneously exploring and optimizing continuous search spaces, with significant applications to design, testing, and reinforcement learning among other domains.Comment: Accepted to GECCO 202