Feature Construction for Reinforcement Learning in Hearts

Temporal difference (TD) learning has been used to learn strong evaluation functions in a variety of two-player games. TD-gammon illustrated how the combination of game tree search and learning methods can achieve grand-master level play in backgammon. In this work, we develop a player for the game of hearts, a 4-player game, based on stochastic linear regression and TD learning. Using a small set of basic game features we exhaustively combined features into a more expressive representation of the game state. We report initial results on learning with various combinations of features and training under self-play and against search-based players. Our simple learner was able to beat one of the best search-based hearts programs.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: CG
• Authors: Nathan R. Sturtevant, Adam M. White
• Keywords: CG 2006, Computer Graphics, Game, Game Tree Search, TD Learning