David Lupien St-Pierre

David L. St-Pierre, Jean-Baptiste Hoock, Jialin Liu et al.

A recent research trend in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the combination of several programs into one single, stronger, program; this is termed portfolio methods. We here investigate the application of such methods to Game Playing Programs (GPPs). In addition, we consider the case in which only one GPP is available - by decomposing this single GPP into several ones through the use of parameters or even simply random seeds. These portfolio methods are trained in a learning phase. We propose two different offline approaches. The simplest one, BestArm, is a straightforward optimization of seeds or parame- ters; it performs quite well against the original GPP, but performs poorly against an opponent which repeats games and learns. The second one, namely Nash-portfolio, performs similarly in a "one game" test, and is much more robust against an opponent who learns. We also propose an online learning portfolio, which tests several of the GPP repeatedly and progressively switches to the best one - using a bandit algorithm.

Francis Maes, David Lupien St-Pierre, Damien Ernst

Much current research in AI and games is being devoted to Monte Carlo search (MCS) algorithms. While the quest for a single unified MCS algorithm that would perform well on all problems is of major interest for AI, practitioners often know in advance the problem they want to solve, and spend plenty of time exploiting this knowledge to customize their MCS algorithm in a problem-driven way. We propose an MCS algorithm discovery scheme to perform this in an automatic and reproducible way. We first introduce a grammar over MCS algorithms that enables inducing a rich space of candidate algorithms. Afterwards, we search in this space for the algorithm that performs best on average for a given distribution of training problems. We rely on multi-armed bandits to approximately solve this optimization problem. The experiments, generated on three different domains, show that our approach enables discovering algorithms that outperform several well-known MCS algorithms such as Upper Confidence bounds applied to Trees and Nested Monte Carlo search. We also show that the discovered algorithms are generally quite robust with respect to changes in the distribution over the training problems.