Monte Carlo Tree Search in Go Adrien Couetoux¨ and Martin Muller¨ and Olivier Teytaud Abstract Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) was born in Computer Go, i.e. in the application of artificial intelligence to the game of Go. Since its creation, in 2006, many improvements have been published. Programs are still by far weaker than the best human players, yet the gap was very significantly reduced. MCTS is now widely applied in games, in particular when no trustable evaluation function is read- ily available. This chapter reviews the development of current strong Go programs and the most important extensions to MCTS that are used in this game. 1 Introduction This chapter describes the application of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) meth- ods to the game of Go. Computer Go was the first major success story for MCTS, and many important techniques were developed in this context. Go remains the best studied application, with a huge amount of practical work as well as many publica- tions over the last seven years. The game of Go is a perfect information turn-based two player board game. As usual in board games, actions are called moves. In Go, a normal move consists in placing a single stone on the Go board, plus removing any captured opponent stones from the board. Special move types are passing and resigning. Adrien Couetoux¨ Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, e-mail:
[email protected]. edu.tw Martin Muller¨ Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, Canada, e-mail: mmueller@ ualberta.ca Olivier Teytaud, Tao, Inria, Lri, UMR CNRS 8623, Universite´ Paris-Sud, France e-mail:
[email protected] 1 2 Adrien Couetoux¨ and Martin Muller¨ and Olivier Teytaud The state of a Go game is described by the location of black and white stones on the board, plus the move history, including who plays next.