Multi-Stage Temporal Difference Learning for 2048-like Games
This is an incremental improvement for game AI researchers and developers, enhancing reinforcement learning methods specifically for puzzle games like 2048 and Threes.
The paper tackles the problem of improving performance in 2048-like games by addressing the difficulty of reaching large tiles with temporal difference learning, proposing multi-stage TD learning which significantly increased rates of reaching high-value tiles, such as 31.75% for 32768-tiles and achieving the first 65536-tile.
Szubert and Jaskowski successfully used temporal difference (TD) learning together with n-tuple networks for playing the game 2048. However, we observed a phenomenon that the programs based on TD learning still hardly reach large tiles. In this paper, we propose multi-stage TD (MS-TD) learning, a kind of hierarchical reinforcement learning method, to effectively improve the performance for the rates of reaching large tiles, which are good metrics to analyze the strength of 2048 programs. Our experiments showed significant improvements over the one without using MS-TD learning. Namely, using 3-ply expectimax search, the program with MS-TD learning reached 32768-tiles with a rate of 18.31%, while the one with TD learning did not reach any. After further tuned, our 2048 program reached 32768-tiles with a rate of 31.75% in 10,000 games, and one among these games even reached a 65536-tile, which is the first ever reaching a 65536-tile to our knowledge. In addition, MS-TD learning method can be easily applied to other 2048-like games, such as Threes. Based on MS-TD learning, our experiments for Threes also demonstrated similar performance improvement, where the program with MS-TD learning reached 6144-tiles with a rate of 7.83%, while the one with TD learning only reached 0.45%.