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

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