Emulating Human Play in a Leading Mobile Card Game

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) has become a popular solution for game AI, capable of creating strong game playing opponents. However, the emergent playstyle of agents using MCTS is not neces- sarily human-like, believable or enjoyable. AI Factory Spades, currently the top rated Spades game in the Google Play store, uses a variant of MCTS to control AI allies and opponents. In collaboration with the developers, we showed in a previous study that the playstyle of human players significantly differed from that of the AI players [1]. This article presents a method for player modelling using gameplay data and neural networks that does not require domain knowledge, and a method of biasing MCTS with such a player model to create Spades playing agents that emulate human play whilst maintaining strong, competitive performance. The methods of player modelling and biasing MCTS presented in this study are applied to the commercial codebase of AI Factory Spades, and are transferable to MCTS implementations for discrete-action games where relevant gameplay data is available

Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature (Fall 2011)

Victorians. A Journal of Culture and Literature is sponsored for the Victorian Group of the Modern Language Association by Western Kentucky University and is published twice yearly.Greetings from the Editor / Deborah Logan -- From Paris to Punch: William Makepeace Thackeray and a New Era in Social Satire / Clare Horrocks and Gary Simons -- "Great and Undeniable Likeness": Portraiture, Legitimacy, and Realism in Thackeray's The History of Henry Esmond / Carolyn Jacobson -- Thackeray and India: Re-examining England's Narrative of its Indian Empire / Susan Ray -- Bildung by Numbers: Serialization, Readership, and Narrative Form in Thackeray's Pendennis Novels / Alice Crossley -- The Green Silk Purse and Little Rawdon's Shirt: Sartorial Literacy and Domestic Performance in Vanity Fair / Stephanie Womick -- "in company let us hope with better qualities": Invoked Readers in Vanity Fair / Sean P. O'Brien -- Furniture and Domesticity in Vanity Fair / Jennifer Sattaur -- The Male Body and Heroic Manhood in Thackeray's Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero / Nikole King -- Vanity Fair's Ethic of Readerly Emotion / Julia Bninski -- 'Twas the Night before Waterloo: Narrating the Nation in Vanity Fair / Cheryl Wilson -- Victorians Journal, Spring 2012 Announcement -- Book Review: Correspondence and Journals of the Thackeray Family, edited by John Aplin / Judith Fisher -- Contributor Biographies -- Books Received -- News, Announcements, CFP