Searching with Partial Belief States in General Games with Incomplete Information

In this paper we present a full-fledged player for general games with incomplete information specified in the game description language GDL-II. To deal with uncertainty we introduce a method that operates on partial belief states, which correspond to a subset of the set of states building a full belief state. To search for a partial belief state we present depth-first and Monte-Carlo methods. All can be combined with any traditional general game player, e.g., using minimax or UCT search. Our general game player is shown to be effective in a number of benchmarks and the UCT variant compares positively with the one-and-only winner of an incomplete information track at an international general game playing competition.

[1]  J. Neumann,et al.  Theory of games and economic behavior , 1945, 100 Years of Math Milestones.

[2]  Selim G. Akl,et al.  The principal continuation and the killer heuristic , 1977, ACM '77.

[3]  Leslie Pack Kaelbling,et al.  Planning and Acting in Partially Observable Stochastic Domains , 1998, Artif. Intell..

[4]  Matthew L. Ginsberg,et al.  GIB: Imperfect Information in a Computationally Challenging Game , 2011, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[5]  R. Brafman,et al.  Contingent Planning via Heuristic Forward Search witn Implicit Belief States , 2005, ICAPS.

[6]  Michael R. Genesereth,et al.  General Game Playing: Overview of the AAAI Competition , 2005, AI Mag..

[7]  Piergiorgio Bertoli,et al.  Strong planning under partial observability , 2006, Artif. Intell..

[8]  Malte Helmert,et al.  A Skat Player Based on Monte-Carlo Simulation , 2006, Computers and Games.

[9]  Csaba Szepesvári,et al.  Bandit Based Monte-Carlo Planning , 2006, ECML.

[10]  Neil D. Lawrence,et al.  Missing Data in Kernel PCA , 2006, ECML.

[11]  Stephan Schiffel,et al.  Fluxplayer: A Successful General Game Player , 2007, AAAI.

[12]  Stuart J. Russell,et al.  Exploiting Belief State Structure in Graph Search , 2007 .

[13]  Yngvi Björnsson,et al.  Simulation-Based Approach to General Game Playing , 2008, AAAI.

[14]  Michael Thielscher,et al.  A General Game Description Language for Incomplete Information Games , 2010, AAAI.

[15]  Yngvi Björnsson,et al.  Learning Simulation Control in General Game-Playing Agents , 2010, AAAI.

[16]  James E. Clune,et al.  Heuristic Evaluation Functions for General Game Playing , 2007, KI - Künstliche Intelligenz.

[17]  Jean Méhat,et al.  A Parallel General Game Player , 2010, KI - Künstliche Intelligenz.

[18]  Michael Thielscher,et al.  The Epistemic Logic Behind the Game Description Language , 2011, AAAI.

[19]  Stephan Schiffel,et al.  Reasoning About General Games Described in GDL-II , 2011, AAAI.

[20]  Zongmin Ma,et al.  Computers and Games , 2008, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.