Sparse Sampling for Adversarial Games
Sparse Sampling for Adversarial Games Marc Lanctot1, Abdallah Saffidine2, Joel Veness1, Chris Archibald1 1University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada 2LAMSADE, Universite´ Paris-Dauphine, Paris, France Abstract. This paper introduces Monte Carlo *-Minimax Search (MCMS), a Monte-Carlo search algorithm for finite, turned based, stochastic, two-player, zero-sum games of perfect information. Through a combination of sparse sam- pling and classical pruning techniques, MCMS allows deep plans to be con- structed. Unlike other popular tree search techniques, MCMS is suitable for densely stochastic games, i.e., games where one would never expect to sample the same state twice. We give a basis for the theoretical properties of the al- gorithm and evaluate its performance in three games: Pig (Pig Out), EinStein Wurfelt¨ Nicht!, and Can’t Stop. 1 Introduction Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) has recently become one of the dominant paradigms for online planning in large sequential games. Since its initial application to Computer Go [Gelly et al., 2006, Coulom, 2007a], numerous extensions have been proposed, al- lowing this general approach [Chaslot et al., 2008a] to be successfully adapted to a variety of challenging problem settings, including real-time strategy games, imperfect information games and General Game Playing [Finnsson and Bjornsson,¨ 2008, Szita et al., 2010, Winands et al., 2010, Auger, 2011, Ciancarini and Favini, 2010]. At first, the method was applied to games lacking strong Minimax players, but recently has been shown to compete against strong Minimax players in such games [Ramanujan and Selman, 2011, Winands and Bjornsson,¨ 2010]. One class of games that has proven more resistant is stochastic games.
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