Introducing the Hearthstone-AI Competition
This creates a new benchmark for AI in a specific domain (collectible card games), but it is incremental as it builds on existing game-playing AI frameworks.
The paper introduces the Hearthstone-AI Competition framework to develop AI agents for the complex collectible card game Hearthstone, addressing challenges like deck variety, synergies, randomness, and restricted information.
The Hearthstone AI framework and competition motivates the development of artificial intelligence agents that can play collectible card games. A special feature of those games is the high variety of cards, which can be chosen by the players to create their own decks. In contrast to simpler card games, the value of many cards is determined by their possible synergies. The vast amount of possible decks, the randomness of the game, as well as the restricted information during the player's turn offer quite a hard challenge for the development of game-playing agents. This short paper introduces the competition framework and goes into more detail on the problems and challenges that need to be faced during the development process.