Comparison of rapid action value estimation variants for general game playing

Abstract

General Game Playing (GGP) aims at creating computer programs able to play any arbitrary game at an expert level given only its rules. The lack of game-specific knowledge and the necessity of learning a strategy online have made Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) a suitable method to tackle the challenges of GGP. An efficient search-control mechanism can substantially increase the performance of MCTS. The RAVE strategy and its more recent variant, GRAVE, have been proposed for this reason. In this paper we further investigate the use of GRAVE for GGP and compare its performance with the more established RAVE strategy and with a new variant, called HRAVE, that uses more global information. Experiments show that for some games GRAVE and HRAVE perform better than RAVE, with GRAVE being the most promising one overall.