Ph D in Computer Games and Artificial Intelligence

The field of study of the PhD position offered is Computer Games (CG) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in general. More precisely the games studied are zero-sum two-player complete information games with a high complexity such as Go, Amazons or Shogi. In addition to Tree Search (TS) and knowledge-based techniques, the technique newly used in the computer Go community is Monte-Carlo (MC) [5]. The first aim of the PhD thesis is to explore Machine Learning techniques (ML) such as Evolutionary Computation (EC) or Reinforcement Learning (RL) using high complexity games as testbeds. The second aim is to build strong game playing programs in using ML techniques. To illustrate what can be expected during this PhD thesis, this section explains the field of study in a Go oriented way: Computer Games, Computer Go, Monte-Carlo Go, RL for Computer Go, and Evolutionary Computation for Computer Go. However, the game of Amazons, not described here, is also under investigation in our laboratory.