Simulation-Based Approach to General Game Playing

The aim of General Game Playing (GGP) is to create intelligent agents that automatically learn how to play many different games at an expert level without any human intervention. The most successful GGP agents in the past have used traditional game-tree search combined with an automatically learned heuristic function for evaluating game states. In this paper we describe a GGP agent that instead uses a Monte Carlo/UCT simulation technique for action selection, an approach recently popularized in computer Go. Our GGP agent has proven its effectiveness by winning last year’s AAAI GGP Competition. Furthermore, we introduce and empirically evaluate a new scheme for automatically learning search-control knowledge for guiding the simulation playouts, showing that it offers significant benefits for a variety of games.