Optimised Playout Implementations for the Ludii General Game System
This work addresses performance bottlenecks for game-playing algorithms like Monte-Carlo Tree Search in general game systems, though it is incremental as it builds on existing playout methods.
The paper tackled the problem of speeding up playouts in the Ludii general game system by developing three optimized implementations tailored to specific game rules, achieving a median speedup of 5.08 times faster over 145 games.
This paper describes three different optimised implementations of playouts, as commonly used by game-playing algorithms such as Monte-Carlo Tree Search. Each of the optimised implementations is applicable only to specific sets of games, based on their rules. The Ludii general game system can automatically infer, based on a game's description in its general game description language, whether any optimised implementations are applicable. An empirical evaluation demonstrates major speedups over a standard implementation, with a median result of running playouts 5.08 times as fast, over 145 different games in Ludii for which one of the optimised implementations is applicable.