EvoMCTS: Enhancing MCTS-based players through genetic programming

Amit Benbassat, Moshe Sipper
2013 2013 IEEE Conference on Computational Inteligence in Games (CIG)  
We present EvoMCTS, a genetic programming method for enhancing level of play in games. Our work focuses on the zero-sum, deterministic, perfect-information board game of Reversi. Expanding on our previous work on evolving board-state evaluation functions for alpha-beta search algorithm variants, we now evolve evaluation functions that augment the MTCS algorithm. We use strongly typed genetic programming, explicitly defined introns, and a selective directional crossover method. Our system
more » ... ly evolves players that outperform MCTS players that use the same amount of search. Our results prove scalable and EvoMCTS players whose search is increased offline still outperform MCTS counterparts. To demonstrate the generality of our method we apply EvoMCTS successfully to the game of Dodgem.
doi:10.1109/cig.2013.6633631 dblp:conf/cig/BenbassatS13 fatcat:l5rdo6px2zdopold3g66tkvfyi