Towards Human-Competitive Game Playing for Complex Board Games with Genetic Programming

Recent works have shown that Genetic Programming (GP) can be quite successful at evolving human-competitive strategies for games ranging from classic board games, such as chess, to action video games. However to our knowledge GP was never applied to modern complex board games, so-called eurogames, such as Settlers of Catan, i.e. board games that typically involve four characteristics: they are non zero-sum games, multiplayer, with hidden information and random elements. In this work we study how GP can evolve artificial players from low level attributes of a eurogame named “7 Wonders”, that features all the characteristics of this category. We show that GP can evolve competitive artificial intelligence (AI) players against human-designed AI or against Monte Carlo Tree Search, a standard in automatic game playing.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: AE
• Authors: Denis Robilliard, Cyril Fonlupt
• Keywords: AE 2015, Artificial Intelligence