A Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Approach in Porker Game

Recent years have witnessed the big success deep reinforcement learning achieved in the domain of card and board games, such as Go, chess and Texas Hold’em poker. However, Dou Di Zhu, a traditional Chinese card game, is still a challenging task for deep reinforcement learning methods due to the enormous action space and the sparse and delayed reward of each action from the environment. Basic reinforcement learning algorithms are more effective in the simple environments which have small action spaces and valuable and concrete reward functions, and unfortunately, are shown not be able to deal with Dou Di Zhu satisfactorily. This work introduces an approach named Two-steps Q-Network based on DQN to playing Dou Di Zhu, which compresses the huge action space through dividing it into two parts according to the rules of Dou Di Zhu and fills in the sparse rewards using inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) through abstracting the reward function from experts’ demonstrations. It is illustrated by the experiments that two-steps Q-network gains great advancements compared with DQN used in Dou Di Zhu.